No one could have imagined that video games, no matter how popular or storytelling, could become the inspiration for a television work, which British critic Stephen Kelly considers a "remarkable achievement."

This work is the series "The Last of Us", which aired on the HBO platform on January 15, based on one of the popular video games of the same name in 2013, and impressed audiences and critics.

The series attracted 4.7 million viewers as soon as it first aired, then 10 million viewers the next day, then 18 million viewers by the end of the week, and the first episode has so far exceeded 22 million viewers. He also jumped to 29th place on the list of the best 250 series on IMDb. He called it "one of the best to watch this year."

The creators of the work announced a second season of it, less than two weeks after the first season of 9 episodes, saying, "Now we are happy to do a second season," according to Entertainment Weekly (EW).

Amazing and guaranteed success

Those who follow the international art scene will notice that the attempts of film and television directors to quote famous video games were crowned with dazzling success, starting with the video game "Detective Pikachu", which became famous worldwide in 2018 under the "Pokémon" franchise, before American director Rob Letterman turned it into a 104-minute fantasy comedy film in 2019, entitled "Pokémon: Pokémon: Detective Pikachu won 10 awards and earned 3 times its cost (about $450 million in revenue, against a budget of $150 million).

Then the second adaptation of Japan's leading video game series Sonic the Hedgehog, released in 1991, described as "representative of the culture of the nineties" and listed among the greatest games of all time.

It became a top seller, grossing more than $6 billion until 2022. American director Jeff Fowler turned it into a series of action, adventure and comedy films, of which two parts were released in 2020 and 2022, which collectively won 5 awards and was nominated for 15 awards, and achieved revenues estimated at $ 725 million, against a budget of $ 185 million, and Fowler is expected to show the third part in 2024.

The latest successful adaptation is now in our hands, from a video game about horror, adventure and survival after the apocalypse, which sold 37 million copies and won 320 awards in the gaming industry. It is a quote that Kelly called "the best video game mod ever."

Creativity Quotation

"The Last of Us" is a series by the creator of the original game, Neil Druckman, and Craig Mazen, creator of the 2019 series "Chernobyl", about a man and a teenage girl who travel across the United States during the apocalyptic disaster.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Druckman revealed one of the secrets to his success: a sincere commitment to everything related to the original story, which "offers a study of characters with astonishing depth, in an atmosphere of darkness, violence, slowness, gloom and dread," closely resembling prestigious television and film icons, such as the Queen brothers' masterpiece, No Country for Old Men.

Amid the horrors that swept the United States in the midst of the events of the end of the world, due to cannibal organisms, infected with a mutated fungus called Cordyceps, helped by a climate crisis sweeping the planet, killing billions of people over 20 years, by spreading from the brain to all parts of the body.

This mutated fungus turns surviving humans into rabid monsters that haunt many survivors, including Joel Miller, a Texas construction worker in his fifties, whose desire to survive has turned him into an experienced smuggler, losing his daughter after desperate attempts to keep her safe in the chaotic state of Texas collapsed under the weight of the outbreak.

With him is 14-year-old teenager Ellie Williams, whom he accompanies as "the savior the world is looking for, because she has a rare immunity to infection," according to critic Rebecca Nicholson.

One of the keys to the success of the work, according to critic Richard Newby, is "to provide a different experience than one can get from playing the game, while attracting both gamers and those who are not, as well as those who love this type of (zombie) and those who are tired of it."

Ellie, who hijacks every scene she appears in.

The "super-glittering zombie series," as critic James Ponyziek put it, seemed to set its rhythm primarily on the character of Ellie (Bella Ramsay), the British actress who first appeared as Lyanna Mormon in the sixth season of "Game of Thrones" 2016, which critic Andy Welch considers "a perfect and contradictory combination of innocence, naivety and intelligence," and Kelly sees in her "a charming little horror, full of charisma, courage, wit and warmth, that make her steal every scene she is in."

Ellie's character became the "perfect compass" for the performance of Pedro Pascal, the U.S.-born Chilean actor who played O'Brien Martel in the fourth season of Game of Thrones (2014).

Pascal appeared "in one of the show's great aesthetics, as a model of the emotional, sensitive actor who successfully played Joel, playing the rude and troubled man, dehumanized by grief, buried under heaps of irony and violence, but softening and melting throughout the series," says Kelly.

He justified this change in Joel's personality by the radiation of "Ellie's girl", which Joel was tasked with handing over to the revolutionary militia seeking to topple the Phedra Disaster Management Agency, which rules with an iron fist. Hopefully, they can use Eli's immunity to develop a vaccine against the Cordyceps variant, and restore democracy.