Watching Pixels Die: Sony, HBO, and “The Last of Us”

WITH THE ARRIVAL of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan's Amazon Studios adaptation of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout on April 10, the long-heralded convergence of prestige video games and prestige television finally seems fully underway. A version of this synthesis had long seemed inevitable. Despite decades of usually half-hearted attempts and the prevailing sense that Hollywood has yet to take full advantage of video games as intellectual property with a built-in audience, studios have continued to view the medium as a potential gold mine. Now, at last, with those years of schlocky films fading from cultural memory, upcoming TV adaptations of Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), God of War (2005), and BioShock (2007) suggest that a significant change is underway. And with HBO's critically acclaimed 2023 adaptation of The Last of Us —the “cinematic” 2013 game developed by Sony subsidiary Naughty Dog—we have at least one template for what this collision might look like. That said, the HBO series' cocreators, veteran screenwriter Craig Mazin and Naughty Dog copresident and creative director Neil Druckmann, have seemed intent on not providing that template for the industry. Even in promising to deliver “the best, most authentic game adaptation” and touting the media convergence, Mazin and Druckmann confess to its near-impossibility. “The most important thing was to keep the soul of it, what it's about,” Druckmann mused on the eve of the series debut. “What makes the show are the characters, the philosophical arguments […] The least important part was the gameplay.” “It's just the wrong medium,” added Mazin, who explained to Time that “[w]hen you're watching television, which is passive as opposed to the interactive aspect of playing video games, your moral complications come from your emotional attachment to the characters you love.” Gaming's interactivity, they seem to say, can't be ported to TV, and it's wrongheaded to try. Better to reject the challenge and compensate for the loss with high visual intensity and an expanded field of ethical and affective relation. Better to cede the controller—when control of a linear narrative is, in any case, illusory—for absorption in that narrative. Better to give up […]