By Hy Luu

January 24, 2023

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — “The Last of Us”, the video game series by Naughty Dog, was one of the most influential story games released, and it recently got a TV adaptation by HBO. Directed under Greg Spence, the show depicts minor story changes from the original series.

The game “The Last of Us” was released back in 2013 an action-adventure story driven horror game that has won over 300 game awards. Which has only been topped by Elden Ring last year. Awarded game of the year in 2013 for its story and realistic human behaviors and complex personalities, these factors make good materials to be adapted into a media form.

The show is planned to have nine episodes, each around an hour long. Currently after two episodes, the show has gotten very exceptional reviews by both fans and reviewers alike as the characters’ personalities have been faithfully authentic as depicted in the game.

Greg Spence, the executive producer of the show was also a co-producer for the first two seasons of “Game of Thrones”, critically acclaimed as one of the giants when it comes to TV Shows. 

The show has a budget of $10-15 million per episode totalling to over $120 million for the whole projected season, the joint production by Sony Pictures, Mighty Mint, Word Games, and even the original game studio themselves,Naughty Dog made use of this budget. Many studios and directors were from “Chernobyl”, another HBO show that has come back to work on the TLOU show.

The show has already been immensely successful after having 4.7 million viewers on the first day of the first episode’s premier and on the second day, it received 10 Million viewers. This success already made HBO greenlight the second season of production.

The main characters, Joel and Ellie played by Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, both had previous roles in “Game of Thrones.” Pedro was casted to be the Mandolorian in Disney Series which currently ran for three seasons.