If you are a gamer by any chance, and you play games on your PlayStation, then there is an extremely slim chance that you might’ve not heard about The Last Of Us franchise. Winning the TGA’s ‘Game of The Year’ award in the year of its release, and is widely regarded by many new and veteran gamers as the game of the decade. Even almost ten years of its release and a whole generation of the console has passed, the game is still as popular as ever.
And following the ridiculous success of the video game franchise, Warner Bros. decided to bring the magic of the story to the live-action adaptation scene, making the web series The Last Of Us starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in the lead. While the show had a lot of paying homage to the original source material from the video game, the co-creators of the game apart from Neil Druckmann don’t seem to get the recognition from the show they deserved.
HBO’s The Last Of Us Doesn’t Recognize The Original Game’s Creators
Even when the whole world was in doubt about the live-action adaptation of The Last of Us would fail like many before it, the creator of the show Craig Mazin and the lead creator of the video game Neil Druckmann were optimistic, which paid off at the end. At this moment, the first episode of the series sits with a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as the leads, which is no small accolade to achieve on its own, but it seems like the show missed one thing at the end that has the other co-creators of the video game in worry.
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As we reached the start of the first episode, the words “Based on the PlayStation Studios video game created by Naughty Dog and written by Neil Druckmann,” popped up on everyone’s screens, but many fans found the name of the co-creator of the OG 2013 video game Bruce Stanley missing, which seemed odd as both Druckmann and Stanley have previously shared the credits together. And when the news reached the ears of Stanley, he had a pretty drastic reaction and suggestion to the issue. He said to The Los Angeles Times:
“It’s an argument for unionization that someone who was part of the co-creation of that world and those characters isn’t getting a credit or a nickel for the work they put into it, Maybe we need unions in the video game industry to be able to protect creators.”
This situation took many fans into the past, to a time when a similar issue took place, and it was with the creator of the Vigilante of Gotham City’s co-creator Bill Finger.
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Why Is The Situation Similar To Bill Finger?
Most know Bob Kane as the creator who introduced the world to batman 80 years ago, but almost none know about Bill Finger, the 2nd pair of hands who helped build the character that we know and love today. From giving names to characters and places iconic to the Batmanverse, to helping create The Joker, one of the greatest antagonists the world has ever seen. The tragedy of it all was the fact that despite all of his efforts, he wasn’t credited for it in his career.
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But Kane had worked up a deal with DC, where he alone would be credited as the creator of Batman while Finger would work behind the stage. But during a comic convention, he decided to tell the world about his achievement, to which Kane came in and denied his involvement with the project, tarnishing his reputation. This led to his demise in poverty in 1974. Thus, this might be the reason why Stanley brought out the unionization of creators from the industry to avoid such a fate for others.
The Last Of Us, the first episode now streaming on HBO Max
Source: Los Angeles Times
