HBO’s ‘The Last Of Us’ Will ‘Deviate Greatly’ From The Video Game, But Some Things Are ‘Pretty Close’

Game of Thrones season one isn’t an exact replica of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, but it’s pretty darn close. Much closer than in subsequent seasons, even before the show caught up with the books. Similarly, HBO’s The Last of Us, the network’s next mega-event adaptation, won’t skew too far from the source material.

In an interview with IGN, game director and show executive producer Neil Druckmann was asked about how he and showrunner Craig Mazin plan to turn The Last of Us, one of the greatest video games of all-time, into a TV show. “We talked at length that season one of the show is going to be [the first game],” he said, adding that “the philosophical underpinnings of the story” will be similar to what Joel and Ellie go through in the 2013 game (an equally acclaimed sequel, The Last of Us Part II, was released last year). But “as far as the superficial things, like should [a character] wear the same plaid shirt or the same red shirt They might or might not appear in it, that’s way less important to us than getting the core of who these people are and the core of their journey.”

Druckmann also discussed the difference making a video game vs. a TV show:

In the game, [you have to] train the player about mechanics. You have to have more violence and more spectacle to some degree than you would need on a TV show because you don’t need to train people on how to use a gun. So that’s something that’s been really different, and HBO’s been great in pushing us to move away from hardcore action and focus more on the drama of the character. Some of my favorite episodes so far have deviated greatly from the story, and I can’t wait for people to see them.”

HBO’s The Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, does not currently have a release date. But don’t expect it before 2022, at the earliest.