‘The Last of Us’: 8 Biggest Differences Between the Show & Video Game

The Last of Us

The Ultimate Survival Story

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With a disease-ravaged world as sprawling and detailed as The Last of Us, the team behind HBO‘s dazzling take on the PlayStation phenomenon had a lot of ground to cover. And while some adaptations of other beloved games have played fast and loose with what made them so addictive in the first place, this one has struck gold by sticking pretty close to the source material. However, there have been some interesting modifications made in the transition from game to screen, mostly to make sure the show had as much extra life as possible.

1. Bill and Frank have an alternative ending that differs greatly from the game

The gorgeous third episode, “Long, Long Time,” may be the biggest and most beautiful change to the Last of Us canon. Taking supporting characters from the game, the hour showcased the 20-year romance between Bill and Frank (Emmy winner Nick Offerman and fellow nominee Murray Bartlett), two survivors turned partners living in the fortified town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. Their idyllic life together, visited briefly by Joel and Ellie, who are in search of resources, is upended not by the infected, but by a degenerative disease slowly leaving Frank incapacitated. In the game (which only hints at their loving relationship), a far more hateful Frank cruelly leaves Bill and then hangs himself after being bitten by an infected, whereas the show saw him ultimately ask Bill to assist with his suicide as a final act of love. Cocreator Craig Mazin told The Washington Post the change was made to show there “was a chance for things to be OK, and for love to flourish” even in the apocalypse.”

2. The 1968 prologue was created for the series

The series premiere flashed back to a fictional 1968 talk show featuring John Hannah as an epidemiologist warning the audience of a potential fungus-based pandemic triggered by global warming. “There are some fungi who seek not to kill, but to control,” he tells the host (Josh Brener) before explaining how the parasitic Cordyceps can infect an ant’s mind and direct the bug’s behavior, “like a puppeteer.” As unsettling and important as this info is to trumpet what is to come, the prologue was not part of the game. Instead, players got intel on the outbreak and global disaster during a collection of faux news clips throughout the game’s opening credits.

3. A more innocent Henry and a younger version of Sam

While the two brothers do exist in the game, the show made a few interesting alterations to their arc before delivering the devastating turn of events in Episode 6, “Endure and Survive.” The game version of Sam is 13 instead of 8, as he is on the show, and he is not deaf. That change, Druckmann later recalled, was Mazin’s idea: “‘What if he were deaf?’ It’s a way that Sam has to rely on Henry even more. And I said, ‘That’s so good, it makes me upset that I didn’t think about it.’” Nor is Henry a FEDRA informant. They are in no way linked to Kathleen’s vendetta, aside from crossing the Hunters by wandering into their camp looking to pilfer supplies. And players meet them in Pittsburgh, not Kansas City, Missouri, as we do in the show. Also, a fun little Easter egg in this episode is the appearance of the name Ish — a beloved character from the game alluded to here.

4. Spread of the cordyceps virus

In the game (as in nature!), the disease is spread by spores released into the air by the already infected, whether they’re dead or alive. And while both imply that tainted crops may have escalated the outbreak, HBO’s hit tweaked the game’s spread method by making Cordyceps contagious via physical contact, which allowed the showrunners to introduce the new idea of a shared hive mind among the runners, clickers and bloaters as touched upon in that 1968 talk show sequence. It also makes the act of infection horrifyingly intimate at times, as we see with the near “kiss” between Tess and her face-tentacled attacker.

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5. Tess’ death happens with much less of a bang in the game

Speaking of our late, great smuggler! After being bitten by a clicker, Anna Torv‘s badass character went out in a literal (and fan-infuriating!) blaze of glory. Cornered by a horde and clearly about to turn, she demanded that Joel and Ellie flee before she used her less-than-reliable lighter to ignite the gasoline drums laying about, blowing them all to kingdom come. Tess also perishes in the game, but rather than a hero’s death of self-sacrifice, she is gunned down during a run-in with FEDRA soldiers.

6. Kathleen and her brother, Michael, are nowhere in the game

Don’t go looking for the ruthless resistance leader played by Melanie Lynskey in the game. The head of Missouri’s Hunters militia group, along with her dead brother Michael, were made for the show, a composite of several game characters, and boy, did she create a stir! Not only was Kathleen hell-bent on making Henry Burrell pay for betraying Michael to FEDRA — a newly invented plot as well — but it was her single-minded mission to capture outsiders Joel and Ellie that put them all in the way of the marauding infected that escaped the underground in the nightmarish fifth-episode showdown.

7. The Bond Between Ellie and Riley

Instead of playing out Ellie’s doomed romance with FEDRA classmate and aspiring Firefly Riley (Storm Reid) overthe course of several years, the show condensed the plot from the game’s “Left Behind” expansion into a lovely flashback hour of the same name that gives us more scenes at the FEDRA camp and served as an origin story for how both girls were bitten by a lone infected (rather than the game’s horde) during a date night at an abandoned mall.

8. Ellie’s mom… and Her Birth

The show’s ninth episode, “Look for the Light,” fills in a major blank with an opening flashback that gives us more backstory on Ellie’s mom than the game has so far. Turns out a pregnant Anna (played by Blindspot‘s Ashley Johnson, the original voice of Ellie in the games) — who was living in a cabin with Marlene and the Fireflies at the time — had gone into labor just after being sensed by an infected who broke into the cabin and attacked her. Anna offed the mutated killer with a switchblade and delivered her daughter but made the grim realization that she’d been bitten before the baby arrived…which seems to imply that Ellie may have developed her immunity to Cordyceps in utero. Unfortunately, Anna’s own infection led her to beg bestie Marlene to mercifully kill her shortly after Ellie’s arrival.

The Last of Us, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, April 13, 9/8c, HBO and Max

This is an excerpt from TV Guide Magazine’s The Last of Us: The Ultimate Survival Story special issue. For an in-depth look at the critically-acclaimed HBO series, featuring behind-the-scenes secrets and a preview of the highly anticipated second season, pick up a copy of the issue available on newsstands on April 11, or order online here.