In one horrific night, Joel’s life is changed forever. As the player’s introduction to the world of The Last of Us, the evening spent with Joel, Sarah, and Tommy as the cordyceps outbreak changes everything cements the tone, style, and stakes of the franchise’s world. Whether you experienced that opening nearly a decade ago, or just recently via The Last of Us Part I on the PlayStation 5 console or The Last of Us on HBO, Joel’s harrowing night is an effective and necessary introduction to fully understanding Joel and Ellie’s journey throughout the rest of the game.
To help us understand how that sequence came to be, and how its legacy lives on today, members of the Naughty Dog team and HBO show spoke about the work undertaken originally to create such an evocative opening, and how The Last of Us Part I brings these moments to fresh life.
Spoilers ahead if you haven’t played or watched The Last of Us!
The End Is the Beginning
While the introduction is also The Last of Us’ first chance to leave an impression on the player, the Naughty Dog team obviously iterated and adjusted this sequence throughout development. One of the most significant among those? Players would have, originally, had control of Joel much earlier.
“The beginning of the game was one of the last things we got finalized when we were making The Last of Us,” Naughty Dog President and The Last of Us Co-Director Neil Druckmann said. “For a long time, the plan was to play as Joel, not to play as Sarah, and you as Joel would hear commotion over at your neighbor’s house, you would walk over there, you’d see they’re infected. Then you’d head back and grab your daughter…and then everything else [in the final game] was how it was planned.”
But starting the adventure and experiencing all that through Joel’s perspective felt… familiar to the team. In wanting to differentiate the story from others in its genre, the idea of playing as Sarah came up during a design brainstorm. With that, “everything kind of fell into place” according to Druckmann.
“That felt like a really unique take on [this story]. The fact that you