“The Last of Us” Season 2 is coming to a close, but with HBO’s mushroom apocalypse officially greenlit for more episodes beyond the source material, Hollywood’s video game renaissance is just getting started. “A Minecraft Movie” went around the sun making money at the box office this spring. Even met with middling-to-bad reviews, “Until Dawn” more than got its budget back.
“I think you’re seeing a lot of mining right now of the most popular games,” said Neil Druckmann to IndieWire. Head of the video game studio Naughty Dog, where he co-wrote the record-breaking “The Last of Us Part II” with Halley Gross, the writers named their own game, “Fallout,” “Halo,” and “Twisted Metal” as major properties that were obvious to adapt.
“But there’s a lot of niche, smaller games that are really beautiful,” said Druckmann, who is also executive producer and co-creator with Craig Mazin on “The Last of Us” TV show. A former “Westworld” creative, Gross wrote several episodes with the showrunner and Druckmann.
“Games do a beautiful job of immersing you in different worlds,” Gross told IndieWire. “There are distinctions between mediums, between games, between film, between TV, but at the end of the day, it’s about experiencing something outside of yourself and broadening your horizons.”
Emphasizing the importance of indie games to an indie film site, Druckmann and Gross offered several game adaptations they want to see translated for the big screen or TV.
“There’s this game called ‘Inside’ that is one of the best told stories I’ve experienced in any medium,” he said. “Likewise, there’s this game called ‘Ico’ and ‘Shadow of the Colussus’ and ‘The Last Guardian.’ This is this trilogy of games by this genius of a director, Fumito Ueda. And I would love to see those find a broader audience if for no other reason than that people will talk about them, and they’ll go back and play those games because I think they’re brilliant.” Druckmann also mentioned a card game.
“Oh, my God, he loves ‘Balatro,’” Gross laughed. “Hopefully, our show makes people go, ‘Hey, wait, what games can be like that? Now, I’m intrigued, and now maybe I’m playing something new. Maybe I’m trying ‘Ghost of Tsushima’ or ‘God of War.’ It’s really exciting to bring these two things together.”
She continued, “We’re in this really interesting renaissance of game adaptations, and our hope is that ‘The Last of Us’ is this bridge.” Sales for both games went up significantly after the show.
Looking ahead, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Mortal Kombat” will return later this year, with sequels set for the fall. Further down the line, we’ll get more major adaptations — think “The Sims” and “Assassin’s Creed,” but also more from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Angry Birds,” and “Sonic the Hedgehog.”
Asked about one of Naughty Dog’s most famous kid-friendly racing title, a major favorite of non-Nintendo families in ’90s, Druckmann had bad news about the movie future of “Crash Bandicoot.”
“Here’s where I’ll break your heart, because ‘Crash Bandicoot’ is not owned by us,” Druckmann said. “‘Crash Bandicoot’ is owned by Microsoft. So while Naughty Dog created ‘Crash Bandicoot,’ they never owned it. So I will direct your question to Phil Spencer, head of Xbox. Ask him to make a ‘Crash Bandicoot’ film. Look, I’ll sign that petition. I’m in full support.”
“The Last of Us” Season 2 airs new episodes on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
