From a video game to television
The Last of Us began as a video game, released for the PlayStation in 2013 by the American studio Naughty Dog, the same company behind the early Crash Bandicoot games, as our Crash Bandicoot page explains. Its story, about a hardened smuggler called JOEL escorting a fourteen-year-old girl, ELLIE, across a ruined America, was praised as one of the best ever told in a game. In 2023 it became a television series, written by the game's creator, Neil Druckmann, and Craig Mazin, and it is a frightening, violent drama made for adults, so this grid is for grown-up fans.
Joel is played by Pedro Pascal, who also plays the lead in The Mandalorian, and Ellie by Bella Ramsey, who had never played the game.
The real fungus that turns ants into zombies
The story imagines a world where a fungus, CORDYCEPS, has infected humans and turned them into aggressive creatures. The idea came from a real natural history programme. Druckmann saw a clip from the BBC series Planet Earth about a fungus in tropical forests that infects ants. Its threads spread through the ant's body and change its behaviour, making it climb a plant and clamp its jaws onto a leaf. The fungus then grows a stalk out of the dead ant's head and releases SPORES onto the ants below.
Real Ophiocordyceps fungi each infect only one kind of insect and cannot infect people at all. Our mushrooms page covers some of the stranger fungi that really exist.
A guitar, a familiar face and a sequel
The haunting music, played largely on guitar and a small Andean stringed instrument called a ronroco, was written by the Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla, who scored both the original game and the series; he had already won two Oscars for film music. Bella Ramsey was known to many viewers before the series for a small but memorable part in Game of Thrones, as a fierce young noblewoman.
A second game, The Last of Us Part II, came out in 2020, and the television series began adapting its story in its second series. The games are famous for their long moments of quiet between the frightening ones, and the series kept that feeling.
Filming a ruined country
Although the story crosses the United States, from Boston to Wyoming, the series was mostly filmed in and around Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, where streets were dressed with rust, rubble and plants to look abandoned. The CLICKER, an INFECTED person whose fungus-covered face has left them blind, finds victims by making clicking sounds and listening for echoes, as bats do, and the performers wore detailed make-up and prosthetics rather than computer effects.
The series won several Emmy awards, and one episode, telling the story of two survivors, BILL and FRANK, living quietly through the OUTBREAK, was praised as among the best single episodes of television of its year. A second series followed in 2025. The grid also holds TESS, Joel's partner; his brother TOMMY and the settlement of JACKSON; MARLENE, leader of the FIREFLIES; RILEY, Ellie's friend; SARAH, Joel's daughter; and the QUARANTINE zone, the BUNKER, the SURVIVOR and the APOCALYPSE, the FUNGUS and the SMUGGLER at the heart of the story.