Like movies, post-apocalyptic nightmares are a setting video games will never abandon. From the Fallout franchise to more recent examples like Hideo Kojima’s wildly inventive Death Stranding series, gamers are more than familiar with exploring ravaged worlds destroyed by nuclear weapons, zombies, or invisible beings from another dimension.
Despite being a well-worn genre for decades, one of its most beloved installments arrived relatively recently: 2013’s The Last of Us, developed by the same Naughty Dog that created another industry darling with the Uncharted series. Not only was The Last of Us met with immense critical acclaim, but it was a watershed moment for video games as an interactive storytelling medium, and its success spawned an equally acclaimed sequel and an HBO TV series adaptation. Given how the game fundamentally changed the medium, it would be unthinkable to imagine that Naughty Dog isn’t planning to return to its decrepit vision of a post-breakdown United States, and recent statements by the series’ creative director, Neil Druckmann, confirm that more is on the way.
On September 28, two days after “Last of Us Day” (a fan celebration marking the day the Cordyceps outbreak reached critical mass in-universe), Druckmann dropped a post on the official Naughty Dog blog. It included an update on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a sci-fi adventure that will be the studio’s next project, and it also confirmed that two new projects set in The Last of Us universe are on the way. “I will tell you that both projects will expand the canon of The Last of Us beyond Part 1 and Part 2,” the post reads.
According to the post, both projects are in the very early stages of development, and there’s no confirmation that they’re even video games. The Last of Us has, of course, branched out to television, so there’s a small chance there could be another TV project in the works (while Druckmann is no longer involved with the creative direction of the flagship show, that doesn’t necessarily exclude him from working on a spin-off), but there’s also the possibility that it could be an original film set in the world of the games, or even a comic book, which the series has done before. It’ll probably be a while before these two mystery projects are fully revealed, but it’s reassuring to know that the universe of one of the most acclaimed video games of all time is still growing.
