Neil Druckmann is on top of the world right now. He created and wrote the highly popular The Last of Us video games, and now he’s getting to see his world adapted for the small screen with The Last of Us TV series on Max, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. At first glance, The Last of Us is yet another in a long line of zombie stories. With The Walking Dead and all of its spin-offs out there, one more zombie story, either as a game or a show, isn’t all that attention-grabbing, but Druckmann found a way to set his version apart thanks to the compelling characters of Joel and Ellie.
Still, as good as things are going for Druckmann and The Last of Us right now, it all began with a rejection from a legend. In college, he was asked to write a zombie story pitch for a contest that would be judged by none other than the godfather of the modern zombie movie, George A. Romero. The pitch Neil Druckmann wrote was very similar to the version of The Last of Us we know today, but Romero rejected it. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because that disappointment fueled the man behind The Last of Us to not let go of the story he needed to tell.
Neil Druckmann’s Zombie Story Was Rejected by George Romero
In 2004, Neil Druckmann was a young college student at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. During this time, his computer class had an interesting assignment: write a pitch for a zombie story, which would be judged by George A. Romero, who also went to Carnegie Mellon and set his films in and around the Pittsburgh area. For example, the mall in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead is a real-life place that still stands to this day in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.
An article in The Hollywood Reporter detailed the zombie pitch Druckmann came up with. Inspired both by the PlayStation 2 game Ico (a two-person puzzle-solving adventure game) and Frank Miller‘s grizzled Sin City hero John Hartigan, Druckmann pitched a story idea revolving around a guy who had lost his daughter, joining up with a girl who had lost her father. Sound familiar? The computer class professor took the idea to Romero, but the famed director passed. Druckmann told The Hollywood Reporter, “He didn’t like it. He picked something else.”
Neil Druckmann Returned to His Zombie Idea After ‘Uncharted’
Thankfully, back in 2004, Druckmann wasn’t destroyed by the rejection. Instead, it fueled him. Druckmann followed his dream and ended up being hired by the gaming company Naughty Dog. He became a co-writer and co-lead designer for the first two Uncharted games, which were very popular, and were ultimately adapted into a 2022 feature film starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.
Druckmann had now risen in the ranks so high that for Naughty Dog’s next project, he was allowed to pick the idea. Having never let go of that college pitch, which he’d turned into a graphic novel, Druckmann returned to his zombie tale about a father and a young girl, who have both lost everything, teaming up. What happened next would change his life forever.
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‘The Last of Us’ Has a Lot of Similarities to What George Romero Created
The Last of Us could have been just another basic shoot-em-up zombie game, but to stand out in a form of entertainment dominated by similar ideas, Neil Druckmann needed to do something different, telling the Hollywood Reporter that he wanted to do the exact opposite of Resident Evil. Instead of being over-the-top, he wanted his game to be “about intimate relationships — 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 Last of Us got our attention because of its characters. It made playing the game all the more thrilling because it wasn’t just about being scared by monsters jumping out, but wanting these characters we were playing to live because of the story written for them. The Resident Evil movies could avoid using their video game characters and get away with it, but the story of The Last of Us is impossible without Joel and Ellie.
George Romero’s zombie films are so much about characters and deeper themes. There might be lots of blood and death, but at its heart, those movies speak to bigger ideas like race and commercialism. It’s the living humans who matter way more than the undead. It’s a shame that he didn’t see what Neil Druckmann was going for, but it’s also for the best. If Druckmann’s story pitch had won the contest, he probably would have been satisfied and let the idea go. It was that rejection that kept The Last of Us alive in his head, only to rise up like the dead coming back to life a decade later.
