HBO has reportedly spent upward of $100 million on its best hope of breaking the video-game adaptation curse: a series, premièring in January, based on a game called The Last of Us.
Druckmann recounted the experience when I met him in Santa Monica at the headquarters of Naughty Dog, the studio behind The Last of Us. Dressed in joggers and a T-shirt, he offered me a tour, showing off the gaming-magazine covers on the walls. Now forty-four, he’d first arrived there nearly twenty years earlier, as an intern. Born in Tel Aviv and raised in the West Bank, he’d immigrated to Miami with his family when he was ten.
In 2013, the year The Last of Us was released, the industry was dominated by “open-world” role-playing franchises, such as The Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto, which allowed players to pursue only the quests that interested them and to choose whom they killed, romanced, or rescued. Some featured branching narratives, enabling gamers’ actions to influence the plot. But endless possibilities came at a cost: they turned protagonists into mere ciphers.
The shift to television also enabled a different approach to violence. Druckmann had always intended for the game’s brutality to be distressing rather than titillating, but, in a medium where killing is a primary mode of engagement, players can become inured to the cost. As Mazin explained, “When you’re playing a section, you’re killing people, and when you die you get sent back to the checkpoint. All those people are back, moving around in the same way.
Mazin, the son of New York City public-school teachers, graduated from Princeton with a science degree—then drove to L.A. against their wishes, determined to get into the entertainment industry. One of his first big breaks, “Scary Movie 3,” proved to be a nightmare: Bob Weinstein, its producer, called at all hours and showed up on set unannounced, adding and changing scenes.
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