MOVIE NEWS – Bruce Straley co-created The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann, but you can’t tell from the credits of the TV series.

Following the success of the HBO adaptation, The Last of Us has recently been hailed as one of gaming’s greatest stories, with Neil Druckmann widely credited as its creator. But if you look at Mobygames creator list part, you’ll notice that the game’s director is actually a guy named Bruce Straley. And despite his deep ties to the game and his long career at Naughty Dog, Straley told the LA Times that he was completely cut from the series.

Straley was an early hire at Naughty Dog — the 15th hire, as he tweeted in 2014 — and has credits on games like CTR: Crash Team Racing and the original Jak and Daxter trilogy. In 2007, he served as one of two art directors on Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, before stepping up as game director on Uncharted 2, on which Druckmann served as lead designer. The pair then teamed up for The Last of Us, with Straley serving as game director and Druckmann as creative director.

After the first part, he became the director of Uncharted 4, but he did not return to work on The Last of Us 2, but announced in 2017 that he was leaving the studio.

“After leading three extremely demanding projects and spending extended time away from the office, I felt my energy being focused in other directions and I slowly realized that this was the signal that it was time to move on,” Straley wrote. on Naughty Dog’s blog.

According to the Times, relations between Straley, who launched a new studio called Wildflower Interactive in 2022, and Naughty Dog have since been “strained.” And while Druckmann is apparently in the HBO series, Straley’s name is nowhere to be seen, and he doesn’t appear to be making any money from it.

“It’s pro-union that someone who was a part of co-creating that world and those characters doesn’t get credit or a dime for the work they put in,” Straley said. “Maybe we need unions in the video game industry so we can protect the creators.”

The exclusion is especially baffling (and, I guess, annoying) given that the HBO streaming series is more of a remake of the 2013 video game than other game adaptations. And as Kotaku pointed out, Straley received special credit for The Last of Us Part 1 remake, “for his decisive role in the development of The Last of Us” .

Unions and credit scores have become a major issue in the games industry in recent years, and while this isn’t the most egregious example of game developers being ignored by their former employers, it definitely doesn’t look good.

Source: PC Gamer