A Last of Us prequel almost happened, using part of the HBO show

pcgamesn.com:

With The Last of Us PC release date right around the corner and the first season of the hit HBO show coming to a close, the Naughty Dog zombie game series’ co-creator Neil Druckmann has talked about how a different studio almost made a separate The Last of Us prequel, although the game ultimately never came to pass.

Spoilers for The Last of US HBO show episode nine will follow, you’ve been warned.

The Last of Us prequel game stemmed from an aspect of the recent HBO show that never actually made it into the original survival game: Ellie’s mother. In the HBO show’s ninth episode, Ashley Johnson (the Ellie actor from the games) plays Ellie’s mother, and we get a look at how and why Ellie seems to be immune, and her immediate connection to the Fireflies, too.

The idea of Ellie’s mother was already something Naughty Dog had been considering for a long time, as Druckmann tells Kinda Funny that it was actually almost part of a Last of Us prequel, although he doesn’t say exactly how.

“There was a much more full version of this story that went more back in time that was going to be made into a videogame,” Druckmann says. “Not by Naughty Dog, but a different game studio, and [Kinda Funny host] Greg Miller introduced me to that studio and we had talked to them for quite a while to do this thing and then it didn’t quite work out.”

On the topic of other studios working on the series, it looks like The Last Of Us’ PC port isn’t being solely developed by Naughty Dog, as an update to the PC specs for the game adds studio Iron Galaxy, which also worked on porting the Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection to PC in 2022.

It’s unclear what the potential work split between Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy is right now, or what it could mean for