LOS ANGELES, Jan 12 (Reuters) – The 2013 online game “The Final of Us” was successful with critics and gamers due to a robust narrative. Ten years later, that story is headed to tv on HBO in what the trade hopes is a harbinger for artfully adapting video video games to TV and movie.
“The Final of Us,” created by online game developer Naughty Canine and printed by Sony Leisure, follows hardened survivor Joel and his younger protege Ellie as they navigate a post-pandemic world combating individuals and mutated creatures.
The zombie thriller, which premieres on Sunday, stars “Recreation of Thrones” veterans Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.
The PlayStation sport received quite a few awards, together with “Recreation of the 12 months” on the seventeenth Annual Design Innovate Talk Entertain summit (DICE), which honors online game trade professionals.
The TV sequence has acquired glowing opinions from critics, garnering a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
“It shouldn’t be shocking {that a} drama primarily based on a online game can have coronary heart. An amazing, sensible sport relies on private connection,” New York Times critic James Poniewozik wrote.
Simon Cardy from IGN known as the sequence “an excellent retelling of one among video video games’ most beloved tales that rebottles the lightning of what made it so particular to many within the first place, letting it strike once more to beautiful impact.”
Eventually week’s CES 2023 know-how commerce present, Sony chief government Kenichiro Yoshida stated Sony has 10 game-inspired movies and TV initiatives in numerous growth levels.
Throughout the Los Angeles premiere on Monday, Pascal defined the sport’s “affect on its viewers was due to its storytelling,” including the way in which that TV exhibits can broaden narratives made it a “type of good marriage” for HBO and “The Final of Us.”
Ramsey stated she hoped “individuals can notice that video video games can have an ideal story, such an ideal story that it might then be tailored right into a TV present.”
Showrunner Craig Mazin, creator of HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” instructed Reuters that whereas he loves video games that take him into area and the previous, adapting “one thing that was grounded and actual, I believed, was beautiful – even the monsters.”
Co-president of Naughty Canine and co-showrunner Neil Druckman, who labored on the unique “The Final of Us” sport, introduced a number of actors from the online game into the sequence, together with Troy Baker, who voiced and acted out Joel, and Ashley Johnson, who voiced Ellie.
Johnson performs Anna, who’s Ellie’s mom. “Greenleaf” actor Merle Dandridge reprises her position of the commander of the Fireflies militia group, Marlene, however in-person fairly than in pixels this time.
Reporting by Rollo Ross, Danielle Broadway and Daybreak Chmielewski;
Enhancing by Mary Milliken and Josie Kao
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