Chad Verrall

The relevance of June 14th wasn’t on my radar until I popped onto Twitter this morn. We had no idea the impact #TheLastofUs was going to have on the industry & our lives. But we had an idea for something no one had done in the story-driven AAA space before, so we went for it...

And I think ppl still don’t quite understand what’s special about TLOU. Not journos, not devs. It’s not story “VS” gameplay. It was story + gameplay. It was an honest attempt to marry story and interactivity - it was the sum of the parts that made the most powerful experience.

We truly tried to look at every moment of that game and ask how the interactive aspect of our medium could evoke emotions from the player, connections & empathy with the characters, and create more engagement with the situation.

We dissected story structure & character arcs, took as much story out of cutscenes that we could, & created huge chunks of playable story moments. We constantly asked ourselves “How can we make a more playable story?”

A testament to the success of this idea, is you cannot watch a “cutscene-only” YouTube video from the game & have the story make any sense. Without the gameplay sections, huge swaths of a character arcs & story beats are missing.