While any zombie-ish game/film/whatever is going to invite comparisons to George Romero's work, there's a stronger link between The Last of Us and the maestro of the undead than that.
In an interview with Creative Screenwriting Last of Us Creative Director Neil Druckmann had this interesting little nugget about the game's conception:
"The initial concept, the initial seed of it, came to me back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, and we had a project we had to do. It was actually pretty cool, because we were in Pittsburgh, and they got the rights to do a Night of the Living Dead project.
"The way it worked was we came up with different concepts and then we would pitch to George Romero, who lived in Pittsburgh. So we got to work a little bit with George Romero. I was really intrigued with this concept of these two characters living in this zombie world where the girl at some point would become the protagonist, like a switch. And that’s really all that remained from that story. Everything else is more recent."
Note that Druckmann's saying the idea came out of sessions that involve Romero, not that Romero directly contributed. It's an interesting link, nonetheless. It's worth clicking through for the entire interview if you're interested in games writing.
Source: Creative Screenwriting
In an interview with Creative Screenwriting Last of Us Creative Director Neil Druckmann had this interesting little nugget about the game's conception:
"The initial concept, the initial seed of it, came to me back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, and we had a project we had to do. It was actually pretty cool, because we were in Pittsburgh, and they got the rights to do a Night of the Living Dead project.
"The way it worked was we came up with different concepts and then we would pitch to George Romero, who lived in Pittsburgh. So we got to work a little bit with George Romero. I was really intrigued with this concept of these two characters living in this zombie world where the girl at some point would become the protagonist, like a switch. And that’s really all that remained from that story. Everything else is more recent."
Note that Druckmann's saying the idea came out of sessions that involve Romero, not that Romero directly contributed. It's an interesting link, nonetheless. It's worth clicking through for the entire interview if you're interested in games writing.
Source: Creative Screenwriting
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