Topher
Gold Member
Interview from August 2013. Seems obvious to me that Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann were both heavily involved in creating all aspects of the game. Everything they say in this interview is "we".
GamesBeat: I’m very curious about inspirations and intentions in the way you told the story and the inspirations for the characters. Can you talk about some of those? Maybe the inspiration for Ellie, for example?
Druckmann: When Bruce and I were working on Uncharted 2, we would brainstorm a lot of gameplay scenarios or story scenarios. One of the things we ended up calling “The Mute Girl” is a sequence of gameplay—Again, this was all just theoretical. Drake was in this war-torn city. He joined this rebel group that was fighting a civil war. They all bed down for the night, and one of the members of the group is this teenage girl, who is mute.
We started to brainstorm how you would form a bond through gameplay, where you can’t rely on dialogue. She would shake Drake awake in the middle of the night and motion for him to follow her. She’d start climbing up buildings and jumping gaps and you’re following her and seeing that she’s excited. She really wants to share something with you. As you’re climbing up on this rooftop of this building, you get to see a vista over this whole city as it’s lit up. You hear gunfire and stuff in the distance, but it’s this really beautiful moment that you get to share with this character, all through gameplay.
That idea stuck in the back of our minds when we started discussing our next project. That morphed into a question: could you build an entire game around this concept of meeting a character really early on and forming a bond that would evolve and shift as you see all the facets that a deep relationship between two people can have.
GamesBeat: A lot of people have said that this is a really good game. The sales are backing that up. But it’s in a crowded genre, this zombie genre. One of my editors called it a “zombie game,” and when I first heard that, I sort of did a double take. I never really thought of this as a zombie game. There are plenty of opportunities to have these kinds of moral dilemmas in this zombie genre, though. The Walking Dead is another good example of that. How do you tell a zombie story without falling into the trap of just being one more zombie game?
Straley: When Neil and I were talking about the original idea, we were looking at a bunch of things as far as media – books we were reading, movies we were watching – that all came together. We saw this opportunity where survival horror, or whatever you want to call it, gave us an opportunity to develop characters inside of that world. Nobody had really done that in video games yet. Taking what we’d learned from the Uncharted series, studying the craft of creating characters and paralleling that with the conflict in gameplay and conflict in stories, we can make you as a player feel more of what it’s truly like to exist inside of a world where every bullet counts and each step you take is a conscious choice that’s going to make or break your existence.
The pressures of the world allow us to develop interesting characters. They force characters to make interesting choices. That’s where it started. Most of the games out there at the time were kind of cartoonish B-movie takes on it. We wanted to ground it and make it more serious. We felt like the more intimate we made the story, the more intimate we made the combat, the more we could make players feel what it would be like to have to exist as a survivor. We seized that opportunity.
venturebeat.com
GamesBeat: I’m very curious about inspirations and intentions in the way you told the story and the inspirations for the characters. Can you talk about some of those? Maybe the inspiration for Ellie, for example?
Druckmann: When Bruce and I were working on Uncharted 2, we would brainstorm a lot of gameplay scenarios or story scenarios. One of the things we ended up calling “The Mute Girl” is a sequence of gameplay—Again, this was all just theoretical. Drake was in this war-torn city. He joined this rebel group that was fighting a civil war. They all bed down for the night, and one of the members of the group is this teenage girl, who is mute.
We started to brainstorm how you would form a bond through gameplay, where you can’t rely on dialogue. She would shake Drake awake in the middle of the night and motion for him to follow her. She’d start climbing up buildings and jumping gaps and you’re following her and seeing that she’s excited. She really wants to share something with you. As you’re climbing up on this rooftop of this building, you get to see a vista over this whole city as it’s lit up. You hear gunfire and stuff in the distance, but it’s this really beautiful moment that you get to share with this character, all through gameplay.
That idea stuck in the back of our minds when we started discussing our next project. That morphed into a question: could you build an entire game around this concept of meeting a character really early on and forming a bond that would evolve and shift as you see all the facets that a deep relationship between two people can have.
GamesBeat: A lot of people have said that this is a really good game. The sales are backing that up. But it’s in a crowded genre, this zombie genre. One of my editors called it a “zombie game,” and when I first heard that, I sort of did a double take. I never really thought of this as a zombie game. There are plenty of opportunities to have these kinds of moral dilemmas in this zombie genre, though. The Walking Dead is another good example of that. How do you tell a zombie story without falling into the trap of just being one more zombie game?
Straley: When Neil and I were talking about the original idea, we were looking at a bunch of things as far as media – books we were reading, movies we were watching – that all came together. We saw this opportunity where survival horror, or whatever you want to call it, gave us an opportunity to develop characters inside of that world. Nobody had really done that in video games yet. Taking what we’d learned from the Uncharted series, studying the craft of creating characters and paralleling that with the conflict in gameplay and conflict in stories, we can make you as a player feel more of what it’s truly like to exist inside of a world where every bullet counts and each step you take is a conscious choice that’s going to make or break your existence.
The pressures of the world allow us to develop interesting characters. They force characters to make interesting choices. That’s where it started. Most of the games out there at the time were kind of cartoonish B-movie takes on it. We wanted to ground it and make it more serious. We felt like the more intimate we made the story, the more intimate we made the combat, the more we could make players feel what it would be like to have to exist as a survivor. We seized that opportunity.
The definitive interview with the creators of Sony’s blockbuster The Last of Us (part 1)
The characters. The inspirations. The intentions. The creators tell us what they aimed for.
venturebeat.com
and just because you get credit doesn't mean you get paid. Only the owners get paid. In this case naughty dog. Neil will get paid for the work he did on the show
