‘The Last Of Us’ Won’t Break The Video Game Adaptation Curse, Because It’s Already Broken

I feel like something a bit weird is happening with The Last of Us on HBO, which seems like it’s on a mission in its promotion to project a message of “see, games can have real stories and video game adaptations can be good.”

Here’s writer Craig Mazin, who I love, but he’s being a bit too sweeping here with his declaration about The Last of Us to Empire: “It’s an open-and-shut case: this is the greatest story that has ever been told in video games.”

I mean, it’s a very good video game story, don’t get me wrong, but I think there’s some debate to be had there, even if you are promoting your own adaption of the project. Now, enter this new interview with Neil Druckmann and Mazin in The New Yorker called “Can ‘The Last of Us’ Break the Curse of Bad Video-Game Adaptations?”

I recognize that at one point, maybe back around 2016, the so-called “video game adaptation curse” was still in place. We had decades of so-bad-they’re-sort-of-good things like the Resident Evil movie series. We had megabudget failures like Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia. We had epic cancelled projects like Peter Jackson’s Halo, and Gore Verbinski’s BioShock.

But in 2019, that started to change pretty significantly, and every year since, we have seen at least one great video game adaptation, or at the very least, an adaptation of the world of the video game, if not the exact storyline. We have:

Castlevania (2017-2021), a series that probably deserves credit for starting all this back in 2017, but it took a while for people to take notice, and by its final season, became one of the best game adaptations in history.

Detective Pikachu (2019)which took Pokemon to live-action, global box office success in a charming package where somehow, Ryan Reynolds voicing Pikachu actually worked.

The Witcher Season 1 (2019), which yes, is an adaption of the books, but Henry Cavill is a huge fan of the games, and has credited his performance as Geralt as being influenced by the games themselves.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), an absolutely stellar film that really did not seem like it was going to work after its initial trailer showed a horrifying looking Sonic, but re-animation did it wonders, and it also spawned a great, also successful 2022 sequel.

Arcane (2021)a gorgeously animated series in the League of Legends universe that was among the best shows to air on TV that year, animated or otherwise, video game-based or otherwise.

Uncharted (2022), the blockbuster that audiences loved and became a global smash hit for Sony, after a decade languishing in development hell.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners (2022), from Studio TRIGGER and CD Projekt Red, a thrilling, heartfelt story set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, which was so good it actually sparked a resurgence for the video game itself, sending it rocketing to top of sales charts for weeks.

Looking ahead to 2023, when The Last of Us will air, besides that I’m willing to bet that the Super Mario Bros. movie will A) be good and B) make an insane amount of money at the box office.

Look, I absolutely believe The Last of Us on HBO will be great. It very well could be the best live-action video game adaptation to date, and one that is a direct adaptation at that. But acting like it’s breaking some curse that has been broken half a dozen times over in the last five years is either disingenuous, or you’re simply not watching enough stuff.

Update (12/28): I’ve now realized that it wasn’t just an editorial decision to make the “video game curse” line the title of the New Yorker pieceit was also a direct quote from Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, Last of Us director, who really should know better:

“Hopefully, this will put that video-game curse to bed,” Druckmann said, which came after an exchange with Mazin about how a game like “Doom” was something that did not need to be adapted, which produced a famously disastrous movie starring The Rock in 2005.

Again, that was 2005, and it’s pretty ridiculous to simply ignore all the great video game projects that have come to life since then, namely the ones I’ve listed above.

Another quote from Mazin is making the rounds about the violence in the show compared to games:

“When you’re playing a section, you’re killing people, and when you die you get sent back to the checkpoint. All those people are back, moving around in the same way.” At a certain point, they read as obstacles, not as human beings. In the show, such encounters would carry more weight: “Watching a person die, I think, ought to be much different than watching pixels die.”

Some are saying this is taken out of context when shared on social media because he’s referring to game NPCs and how the player and enemies respawn through checkpointing systems, but it still strikes me as weirdly dismissive with the “watching pixels” die line. In general, I don’t understand why both Mazin and Druckmann, both huge gamers, feel the need to seemingly belittle their own source material’s medium and ignore other contributions made in the adaptation space the past five years especially. Maybe that is not their intent, which is probably what they’d say, but that is certainly how it is coming across in pieces like this. I don’t think The Last of Us needs to be sold at the expense of tearing other portions of the video game medium down.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.