Apocalypse on Repeat: The Last of Us, Part I

In 2022, the opening of The Last of Us: Part I depends on a landline phone. 

Sarah Miller answers the phone in her room. Her father’s cell phone is elsewhere in the house. Another technological relic. The landline—and to a lesser degree Joel’s early smartphone—are barely worth mentioning  in the overall Last of Us world, but they are early signs in the 2022 remake that the narrative is meditating on a time past.   

The Last of Us, like any media, is a product of its time. Naughty Dog’s magnum opus captured both the Playstation 3’s graphic performance peak and, strangely, the optimism of 2013. It feels weird to call The Last of Us an optimistic narrative—it’s a world torn asunder by a parasitic fungus. The game world’s supercharged version of Cordyceps realized in spores; infected, clickers, and bloaters metaphorizing compounded fears of an uncontrolled pandemic and climate emergency. Fears that the survivors feel can be overcome by a nearly unquestionable young savior figure. Reliving these fears in 2022 feels like peering through a screen into someone else’s life untouched by similar catastrophe. Someone who believed that these fears might be waved away or overcome if we simply found the right person under the right conditions.

While collectively we unevenly lived with climate change and global diseases in 2013, the game’s narrative does not meet the current world’s memories of (and continued life with) Covid-19 and what feels like daily threats of collapse under the pressures of this week’s climate emergency. From water shortages to raging wildfires, from droughts to hurricanes, from record breaking heat to electrical grids failing during record winter storms, we have transitioned into a world of climate catastrophe in the decade following The Last of Us.

The end that The Last of Us imagined was really the transition to a post-apocalyptic world as imagined in 2013. In a lot of ways, The Last of Us reimagined Naughty Dog’s first post-apocalyptic narrative from the previous decade. Where Naughty Dog’s Jak II and Jak 3 give large (500 years) time jumps between the moment of apocalypse and player’s interactions with the world, The Last of Us made it more local. 500 years had not passed; 20 years had. Memories of the pre-fall world are not only written but imperfectly remembered.  

The Last of Us narrates an apocalypse in less abstract terms than Naughty Dog’s Playstation 2 (read: George W. Bush era) dive in climate catastrophe in Jak II and 3. Those PS2-era games find a society living with the catastrophic results of the previous world. Its Dark and Light eco- story serves as a useful allegory that abstracts the dangers of toxic scientific exploration and greed at the expense of societal and ecological collapse. 

For The Last of Us, gone are Jak’s Precursors and abstract allegories of fossil fuels and nuclear waste. Instead, players find themselves 20 years removed from the “end of the world.” For its characters, the pre-pandemic world is not one of distant history but of recent memory. Decaying buildings and zombie-like monsters operate as haunting, ever-present reminders of this traumatic event. But this is a world that many of us have interacted and played within before. This concretizsation of an apocalypse felt a lot more grounded in 2013…and again when remastered (at full price) on Playstation 4 in 2014. We have now been invited to enter a world that cannot even be bothered to reimagine the apocalypse or, at the very least, comment or refract it through the lens of the current pandemic and ecological catastrophes. Under the guise of a remake, the full-priced (now $70 rather than $60) Playstation 5 Last of Us Part I repackages ideas of a more optimistic past. As Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek apocraphically claim, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”^[1]See Mark Fisher, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009): pp. 1-11. It seems that the grip of capitalism on the games market also means a lack of reinvention of the apocalypse. As a result, more recent lived realities go unresponded to, at best merely fictionalized in the repurposed media of the past. 

I still find hope that the story can evolve to meet our current (and on-going) moment. The announcement of the HBO series and initial rumors of the “remake” drove my excitement that the first game’s narrative may be reimagined to meet the crises of the 2020s. I had hoped for the same story beats but more confrontation with our own transition toward the end of the world. The actual reveal of The Last of Us: Part I unveiled that capitalism won’t even reimagine the end of the world. Unlike the shift from Jak II to The Last of Us (also ten years apart), the shift from The Last of Us to The Last of Us: Part I did nothing to re-evaluate player and social relations with how we imagine ourselves in the apocalypse. Instead, for the third time in a decade, we played the 2013 vision for the end of the world—one that attempts to present a clear-cut answer on how to cure a pandemic with a white-savior complex to boot. I hope the HBO series makes subtle updates to reflect on how the world has changed since 2013, but if the rumors of Horizon: Zero Dawn “remake” are any indication, I believe I will continue to be left wanting.