Earlier today came the sad news that the video game-to-film adaptation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us was at a standstill, according to producer Sam Raimi. The game, which has won numerous Game of the Year awards and dozens of other accolades, is the perfect kind of material to prove that video games can be adapted into movies and have depth, beauty, meaning, and a sense of importance. Well, if it’s handled by the right people, of course.
So while it’s sad that we’re not going to see The Last of Us progress any time soon (unless something changes in the immediate future), there is an alternative already in place that’s available for any and everyone to get such a fix, should they so desire.
YouTuber Grant Voegtle has put together what he calls The Last of Us Cinematic Playthrough, which is not a longplay or a “Let’s Play” of the game. Rather, he played the game multiple times and then spent, “…dozens of hours [that were] put into filming, editing, rendering and uploading.” The end result is a seven-part series that tells the story of The Last of Us in TV episode lengths (averaging 40 minutes per episode), so it’s easy to watch through it in a couple of days (or an evening, if you’re really getting into it).
Voegtle explains:
This cinematic playthrough is a project designed to push a common and highly demanded (but overly abundant) type of content, YouTube playthroughs, into a more artistic, cinematic, and accessible space. I have three goals in creating this series…
1. Edit and film the playthrough in a way so that non-gamers, or people who are otherwise unable to play the game for any number of reasons, can enjoy watching the game play out as much as players enjoyed playing through it.
2. Give fans of the game a new lens through which to view a game they otherwise know too well. (And for fans who don’t want the movie to be made because it can’t possibly do the game justice in their eyes, this can be an alternative.)
3. To motivate developers, like Naughty Dog, to incorporate film making tools into their future games.
You can watch the entire series below. Be warned that it’s easy to get hooked. I’ve played the game and it was all I could do to not play it every moment I had available.