Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann says HBO’s The Last of Us TV show “will be the best, most authentic game adaptation”.
In an interview with the New Yorker (thanks, Comicbook), Druckmann said he hoped that the show will “put that video-game curse to bed”, although screenwriter Craig Mazin acknowledged that it’s “not the highest bar in the world” to become a great adaptation given some games, like Assassin’s Creed, have “impenetrable” storylines.
“I love the ability to wander, to do nothing, in Skyrim,” Mazin said, before adding that “that is not translatable!” By contrast, however, he said that “The Last of Us was always a story where the story comes first”.
After acknowledging Naughty Dog’s “troubled” history of adaptations – including the Uncharted film which Druckmann says is “fun” – Druckmann and Mazin discussed how the show came to be, with the latter reflecting that “watching a person die ought to be much different than watching pixels die” and that the story should be the focus, not action.