The Last Of Us Creator Unsuccessfully Pitched His Concept To George A. Romero In 2004 – Looper

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann revealed that he originally created his pitch for “The Last of Us” while he was studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. Assigned to craft a zombie story that would later be judged by George A. Romero, Druckmann’s proposed concept saw a man who lost his daughter teaming up with a daughter who lost her father, and took direct inspiration from the Playstation game “Ico” and Frank Miller’s graphic novel “Sin City.”

Druckmann’s professor submitted the pitch to Romero, where the iconic “Night of the Living Dead” director promptly rejected it. “He didn’t like it,” said Druckmann. “He picked something else.” Druckmann would go on to join Naughty Dog shortly after that and would later expand this initial zombie pitch into the form of a graphic novel — deciding that the story ought to be more about the core relationship between its protagonists rather than the zombies themselves.

“What if it’s about intimate relationships?” Druckmann said. “An exploration of the unconditional love a parent feels for their child and the beautiful things that could come out of that and the really horrible things that could come out of that?” The result is perhaps the greatest video game story ever told, and one of the preeminent zombie stories of the 2010s. Regardless of how the HBO adaptation turns out, it’s clear that Romero missed the mark when he rejected Druckmann’s original pitch back in 2004 — as it would later spawn one of the greatest zombie stories of all time.