How ‘The Last of Us’ changed gaming, strained relationships and spawned an empire

Sony’s landmark 2013 game “The Last of Us” didn’t make it easy on players. The concept of creating a relationship between two characters that evolves over the course of the game — that’s fully playable — and that got the players more involved with those characters than any other game had before, that was really exciting for us.” As Joel and Ellie traversed a ravaged America, “The Last of Us” started to feel less like something that belonged to the zombie genre and more like a game about unprocessed trauma. Unlike a TV series or film, in “The Last of Us” game we’re often confined to Joel or Ellie’s point of view, depending on which character we are navigating at the time. “‘The Last of Us,’ when it first came out, game scholars were like, ‘It’s still centering the male gaze and blah blah,’” says deWinter. Straley left Naughty Dog not long after the release of 2016’s “Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End,” before HBO was involved in a “Last of Us” series, and is not credited on the HBO series.