Naughty Dog was unsure The Last of Us would be successful due to its ‘feel’

“The thing when you do a new IP is that you really don’t know. You hope for the best and fear the worst, as cliched as that sounds.”

“It depends on when you asked me during production. If you had asked me a few months out, I would have said that we were going to review poorly and I don’t know how it’s going to sell. As we got closer to finishing it, it felt like it was coming together. I remember going into E3, and I was telling [game director Bruce Straley], ‘I don’t think it’s going to be received well.’ I get Uncharted – it’s got that summer blockbuster feel. It’s got the spectacle. Here, it’s got this very different, intimate feel to it. There are long stretches where there isn’t much action and I don’t know how gamers are going to relate to that.”

“The thing that Bruce and I always said was, ‘Let’s make the game we want to play. Let’s do a game that isn’t out there. It will be the game we want to play, and that’s the idea guiding us.’ That’s all you can really do and hope people will get into it.”

– Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann