“The Last of Us” will not have spores and Neil Druckmann explains why they were removed

Just days after “The Last of Us” premiered on HBO, statements from the series team begin to pile in with new details about the hit video game adaptation for PlayStation. Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, the ones in charge of translating Naughty Dog’s work into live action, They already warned that they would be making some changes to Joel and Ellie’s story.

There will also be changes when it comes to Cordyceps. This fungus, which causes the downfall of civilization in this story, can be transmitted either by direct contact with an infected person or by inhaling the spores floating in the air. The latter method has been removed in the series, as explained to Collider Druckmann, father of the game: “There are some additions we’ve made to the series that I’ve really enjoyed. We wanted to avoid making a zombie series. There are clickers, which help separate us, making them more grounded, but they’re also interesting and weird creatures that use the echolocation to move around the environment, but with the more recent infected, we talked a lot about what that vector would look like because we removed some stuff from the game. The game had spores in the air and people had to wear gas masks, and we decided very early on that we didn’t want that for the series. Eventually, the talks led us to tentacles. And then we thought about how the passage from one infected to another, like mushrooms do, becomes an interconnected network. It became a very scary thing to think that everyone is conspiring against us in a unified way, it’s a concept that I really liked and ended up in the series.”.

Pedro Pascal can breathe easy, he won’t have to wear a mask in this series as well. Craig Mazin also discusses these changes more cryptically: “I will say that there is one character in the game who has a very interesting point of view on mushrooms and his observation of Cordyceps fits into some of the larger themes that the series is about, and who strangely also fits into the notion of beauty and the potential danger of love. Part of what Neil and I wanted to do was make sure that everything in our story, inspired and adapted from the work he’s done on the game, serves to support what’s most important to us, which is the relationship between Joel and Ellie.”.

more science

The creator of “Chernobyl” also claims to have investigated the science of Cordyceps a little more: “We wanted to base the series on as much science as possible. The game has done this in an amazing way, especially for a genre where it would be easy to say ‘there are zombies, but they come from underground’. Cordyceps is a fantastic concept and absolutely real. We wanted to go a little further. We wanted to give as much reality as possible because the more real it is, the more we are connected to the characters.”. Mazin also explained to us in our interview how the coronavirus pandemic affected the series in terms of narrative. Because we are much more aware of the situation now than we were in 2013 when the video game was released.

‘The Last of Us’ premieres its first episode Monday, January 16 on HBO Max.