A new report indicates that a remake ofThe Last of Usis in development at Naughty Dog, but that wasn’t always the case. Naughty Dog’s sequel,The Last of Us 2, has garnered mostly critical acclaim once again for the serieswinning more Game of the Year awards than any other in gaming historyand further cementing Naughty Dog as a premier studio for PlayStation games. But apparently theThe Last of Usremake was originally given to a smaller team of around 30 members pulled from Sony Corp.’s Visual Arts Service Group, a team that has worked in the background on landmark PlayStation series likeSpider-ManandUncharted.
AlthoughThe Last of Uswas remastered for the PS4shortly after its PS3 release, there’s been no official word on a full remake of the game until now. The PS5 has made some impressive leaps in gaming technology, and it seems Sony is keen on releasing one of its blockbuster hits once again for an even bigger audience. The unnamed team from the Visual Arts Service Group was initially given the go-ahead by Sony to do a remake ofThe Last of Us, but the team was also kept secret with severe limitations on budget. This would lead to more disappointment for the development team, and many original members have now left the project.
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The team from the Visual Arts Service Group, lead by group founder Michael Mumbauer, chose to do a remake ofThe Last of Uswith idea that it would be well-received by Sony executives and less expensive to do than a remake of an earlier Sony blockbuster likeUncharted. However, neither of these ideas worked in the team’s favor. A new Sony executive placed over the remake project felt it was still too expensive, and Mumbauer’s team was forced to put the project on hold to instead help Naughty Dog finish up onThe Last of Us 2.
But as soon asdevelopment onThe Last of Us 2was completed, Sony decided to send Naughty Dog team members over to the remake project to help out. Mumbauer’s team saw this as a frustrating breach of autonomy over a project they had worked hard on, and soon it seemed that Sony placed more faith in the Naughty Dog members than on the Visual Arts Service Group team. By December of 2020, Mumbauer and most of the top team members had left the project.
The Last of Usremake project is still in development now at Naughty Dog with assistance from the Visual Arts Service Group. As of now there is no scheduled release date for the project, but the game has been in the works for at least a year.The Last of UsHBO showalso has no release date, but there will likely be more news concerning these projects later this year.
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