How they filmed The Last of Us arcade scene | Hacker News Reader

How they filmed The Last of Us arcade scene

forums.arcade-museum.com

231 pointscelso144 comments

Another fun fact. It is quite expensive to license some games to show in TV/Movies.

What is the logic or justification here? It would never have occurred to me that you have to license games if you are filming in an arcade. Do you have to get a license if you film someone playing on a PlayStation? Playing a board game? Playing with LEGO bricks? Making coffee with a Bialetti? Standing next to a car with trademarked design elements? Is there somewhere some legal clause like you can play with your Game Boy but you can not film it without explicit permission? Is it because in the case of games - or software in general - you are not truly buying it but only getting a license to use it? Do I need a license to film someone using a browser or Photoshop? I mean, I can see that you have to license the music in a film if you make deliberate artistic decision and it really contributes to the scene, but what about some random music playing on a radio in the background? What about the radio in the background of a documentary film?

If I had to guess, it has to do with trademark protection. I went down this rabbit hole when trying to figure out why certain famous buildings were missing from the Spider-Man video game: https://stevenbuccini.com/why-1wtc-isnt-in-spiderman

In addition to trademark laws mentioned by other comment. There is also problem of different countries having different laws for product placement. Overall that may result in situation where unless you have a written agreement (and someone is paying to make such agreement) it's safer and simpler to just hide the brands or avoid using a product. Plenty of examples with brands hidden with a masking tape and similar.

As for random music playing in background, where I live there was a period where you technically needed a special license if you had radio playing in any place of business. Don't even need to film it. I think they later loosened or clarified it so that it only applies to when it can be heard by customers (like a hair salon or restaurant) but not when it's only for employees in an office or a warehouse.

> What about the radio in the background of a documentary film?

Copyright and trademark laws complex with a bunch of exceptions for specific cases without which they would be completely impractical. News reporting is usually excluded, whether that also includes Documentaries is not obvious, might vary between countries.

If one watches Korean TV productions licensed on USA Netflix, almost everything that has to do with other media - games, books, music, movies, television including ads is blurred out, there's one called Reply 1988 that is full of 80s Korean references that are almost all blurred out so it's a kind of surreal experience - a viewer has to deduce what the characters are talking about from their conversations. A trailer for a Hong Kong movie is shown in the episodes in the background television set with a blur filter over the prop television set screen and even the poster is shown entirely blurred out in a character's room.

When I was fresh out of music school I rewrote the music for a tv series for overseas use. The budget was very low and they re-used the songs in many episodes instead of paying for the true number of unique cues in the us version.

Quite simply, yes, is the answer to all of those questions. But I think you know that, especially when you get to the audio questions as it has been discussed here ad nauseam with cops playing music so content creators get hit from youtube's algorithms.

I need a license from LEGO if I am making a film where in some scenes a child is building a LEGO set? This sounds quite frankly completely ridiculous to me and I have a hard time believing it.

Also the police thing does not really seem relevant, they are abusing the system but that does not mean that you are actually in violation of any rule if you are filming a police operation where some music is playing at the scene.

What? Are you saying the police are abusing their powers? No, can't be true! /s

The cops doing this shit don't give a damn if it is breaking of rules or what not. They know that all the content creator is trying to do is get some footage they can put on their channel, promote, get clicks. It's not like they are trying to get footage that can then be used in a law suit. So in this case, the cops win because they know that the algos will flag the content immediately for copyright infringement and not allow the footage to be seen. That's the entire point of the cop's actions, so yet again, they win. What will be awesome is when these lazy creators start finding the music being played and subtract it from the audio feed with a some actual audio skillz so the issue won't be a problem, but that's too much effort on their behalf.

I said nothing no to the contrary, I just said that I think that YouTube incorrectly flags those videos and that the police is exploiting this. If YouTube was better at analyzing the videos, then the algorithm would conclude that the video is showing a police operation, that the music is just background noise and therefore the video is not violating anything and the exploit by the police would no longer work.

By "these lazy content creators" I believe you mean people who are out in the streets exercising their constitutional right to protest, and trying to unmask some of the illegal things the police are up to.

no, those are not the cops doing the music thing, at least from what i've seen. the ones playing the music are when people are acting all up in arms about something and go to the station. maybe there's others, but all of the ones i've seen it was obvious someone was just looking to make some content and not actually achieve anything with their interaction with the police.

Somebody should create a Shazam-type tool that scrubs any video for an audio signature of copyrighted material, and then deletes that audio from the soundtrack.

Would be great if Google could just make this a checkbox one could click when uploading a video.

and how does the automated system know when to remove and and when to leave it because it is a legit use of the audio?

this is something that should definitely be on the uploader's responsibility list of things to do.

“If in the first act you have hung a Mortal Kombat II poster on the wall, then in the following one it should be played. Otherwise don't put it there.” - Anton Chekhov

Can sorta tell how old the writers are (or out of touch). In 2003, when the virus outbreak occurred, Tekken Tag Tournament, maybe Soul Calibur, was what you'd find in an arcade, not Mortal Kombat II, game was _ancient_ by that point.

Eh, smaller privately run arcades often use older machines if that's all they can afford.

I remember in the early 2000s mall arcades in smaller cities and towns were dying and many had old machines. In my town the most popular arcades are almost entirely 80s and 90s machines, many out of order. One is in business mostly as an attraction for the bar on the upper floor.

And I don't remember ANY virus outbreak and downfall of society in the early 2000's either. This show is so unrealistic.

they only missed by a couple of decades

They replied on a comment about this. They were not able to get licenses on anything post 2000

Here's the comment: https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/last-of-us-arcade-s...

And the carousel was playing a Cure song (Just Like Heaven).

I’ll admit I chuckled at the merry go round version of that song. It was a nice touch.

I’m old enough to get to live through 80s music again, which is wierd.

Which I totally missed until I read about it - then had to replay the scene and totally got it

Where i lived Arcades just kept their old machines forever. If a arcade was still open by 2003 they would have Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat and even older stuff like Operation Wolf or Lethal Enforcers.

Funny enough, where I lived in 2003 arcades were ancient already, everyone was at home playing PC/PS2

The writers had little to do with this. If you'd click the actual link, you'd see this is an arcade enthusiast community with two well known members being asked to get involved and help set up the scene.

You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. I think it would _extremely_ odd to see a Robotron 2084 in a mall of all places; and especially an asteroids deluxe. By that time Asteroids Deluxe, which is an unreliable game to begin with, would start to be moving into collectors item or into beat up trash category.

Probably downvoted for the hijack

> Another fun fact. It is quite expensive to license some games to show in TV/Movies.

> We had some pinball machines and arcade games not make the cut because they were too expensive to license, or the IP owner wasn't licensing that particular game for that use at that particular time. We had a Ms Pac-Man that wouldnt clear because they were not allowing a license at that time.

> ...New titles from the 90s were all mostly too expensive to license or use

> ...Some licenses only allowed for showing the game in the deep background, or couldn't feature game play, but only attract modes (Street Fighter II for example).

"New titles from the 90s"

Can anyone on here explain why these IP owners would want to keep their product OUT of these shows? Why would they want to require an agreement/or-money for licensing out when it is free advertising for some old ass IP that could get second life?

For some of the cases, it's just not worth the time and effort, even for that "old ass IP". If HBO/Warner/Discovery shows up asking to use your title and it takes a lawyer 20-40 hours to iron it out at $200/hr, what's the return? Is someone really going to buy a copy of Ms Pac because they saw it in the background of a zombie show?

Some of the IP should have been a slam dunk. I'm surprised Williams/Midway was a hassle since Warner Interactive now owns most of those titles.

For things like pinball with licensed titles, that's a huge mess. If you want a Bally Addams Family pin in your show you not only need to contact the slot machine company that owns the Bally pinball IP but you need to contact Paramount Studios, Anjelica Huston's agent, and the estate of the now deceased Raul Julia. Good luck with that.

The real question is why do you even need a license? I thought it was well established that you can show copyrighted images/text and trademarked images/text in context - i.e you can show beer and signage of real companies that exist in real life.

I really don't understand the value in our currently level of IP law... like you said it often costs more paying lawyers to review contracts than the actual contract is worth.

It might just be as simple as a defensive/precautionary maneuver to convert a slam dunk case into a triviality that could be decided in a default judgment. If you can get there blessing even if you don't need it, it's that much less risk.

You wouldn’t need a license, is the bottom line. It’s CLEARLY fair use to passively display arcade games in a fictional arcade setting, without infringing on the intent of the IP.

Unfortunately, in this litigation-happy world we are becoming increasingly risk-averse.

There was an article recently on how music is now “co-written” by the influences for that piece, as well as the influences for those influence pieces, etc - just to preempt these kind of legal challenges.

It’s fucked up, and it needs to change.

Wasn't it like this forever? Why otherwise all fake brands for cereal, beer and whatnot in movies?

Someone else responded to you - but they seem to have now deleted it.

Those fake brands are either as placeholders for product placement, or the art directors just wanted to have some more fun/control :)

Some products - like beer, cigarettes, etc - likely need to be changed due to advertising restrictions on alcohol/tobacco/etc

There's a myriad of shows where company trademarks are blanked out or modified to something else. Seinfeld is full of this. And I've seen countless shows where actors are using MacBooks or iMacs and the Apple logo on the case is taped over or modified with a different shape. It's not a placeholder for product advertising. Either Apple said no, or wanted some other control over the show's content and oversight on the Mac and the producers refused.

> Either Apple said no, or wanted some other control over the show's content and oversight on the Mac and the producers refused.

No. Apple have absolutely no right to dictate that. It would be fair use to use a commercially available laptop to denote a laptop in a TV show. They could ONLY contest if it was to dilute their mark through misuse. A product being displayed and used in its intended way is - by definition - not misuse.

It is possible that they greeked the product to appease a competitor. e.g. masking out apple logos if they are sponsored by samsung, etc.

But as I already mentioned in a previous comment: we live it a litigation-happy world, and the threat of a court case can be enough to scare some producers - even if it would be unjustified.

Real brands can be distracting visually, even real no-name brands.

I agree with where you're coming from, but this is likely to be backed up by industry norms, standard production contracts, guild/union requirements, and informal black balling. Imaginary property maximalists living their best lives /s.

Many of the things you use as examples are trademarks. Beer signs involve company logos. Beer signs ARE company logos.

I'll give you a real world example. Madonna Ciccone, famous pop singer, published a coffee table book called Sex in 1992. The book, natch, is filled with explicit images and words.

One of the pictures featured Madonna, semi-nude, being sexually penetrated on top of a Williams Electronics "Taxi" pinball machine. The entire machine is visible including a very prominent Williams logo.

Williams took Madonna to court over it and she quietly settled before it got to a judge. Williams had a very strong argument that their trademarks were being used in a manner contradictory to their product - a family-friendly pinball machine. This kind of imagery is damaging to their brand. And, of course, no permission was requested by Madonna. This was a slam dunk case. You need permission to do things like this.

IP holders get all kinds of legal opinions involved when permission is requested. What exactly are you doing with that Ms Pac machine? Is it just background filler, or is a major character going to be beheaded on top of it? It's not just a matter of "can we use this?" but a question of "HOW is this going to be used?"

>? Is someone really going to buy a copy of Ms Pac because they saw it in the background of a zombie show?

I bet Steam could release a deal called "Games featured in the hit show The Last of Us" and it'd sell well. The videogame version of an OST.

They could! But was this an inked deal when negotiating? Or even mentioned?

And now you have made it more complex, because "Games featured" with only Ms Pacman sucks, so you need to get a variety of stakeholders on board, so more meetings, etc.

And who codes the pinball games? Engines exist, but...

Is someone really going to buy a copy of Ms Pac because they saw it in the background of a zombie show?

Do you think the obvious answer is no? Kate Bush's resurgence during the Stranger Things run was so recent...

It is now morally repugnant to not chase every possible dollar? Unless the brand is directly associated with the big evil of a film, I too am at a loss. Reeses Pieces sales famously had an enormous boost after being featured in the movie ET. Other candy companies had refused to be featured in the film.

From a different angle, if a character is seen drinking a Coke Cola, is the film paying for that shot or Coke Cola?

From a different angle, if a character is seen drinking a Coke Cola, is the film paying for that shot or Coke Cola?

As I understand it, yes! Otherwise, it is a made up brand, with the goal of no freebies.

And consider, if this wasn't done, who gets to pick the brand. The actor? Are they already affiliated, and thus, getting kickbacks essentially?

Did a writer, the director, props guy, get cash on the side?

So, it is fake generics, or paid brands...

> Why would they want to require an agreement/or-money for licensing out when it is free advertising for some old ass IP that could get second life?

It's because it is "old ass" and has low value - the corporation gets forever monopoly on the IP basically for free. To work out the licensing deal, some appratchik needs to talk to legal and several people need to be dragged into meetings and write reports and write marketing papers and contracts and all the other ceremonies that go with DoingThings(tm) at a corporation.

And if noone gets promoted or mentioned in the next performance meeting, it ain't happening. It's not like there's any downside for them to keep the IP locked down and inaccessible forever.

I love that we have a system in place that people with complete disdain for art are in complete control of it. Art is better without love.

It’s amazing how much work went into making it look like an abandoned 2003 arcade, even down to the team worrying about the color of the legs of a machine that might give it away as a more recent release. Then HBO stuff a Papermate Inkjoy RT pen in Sarah’s hand right in the first episode. The Inkjoy brand didn’t appear until around 2012 (and the retractable one was a little later). I’m assuming it was a product placement thing but it was quite in your face.

https://productplacementblog.com/tv-series/inkjoy-gel-pen-in...

In the video game, the outbreak was in 2013. Maybe the product placement deal was made with that in mind before they changed the outbreak in the TV show to 2003.

That’s a great point. Even if it’s not the real reason, it’s plausible and better than “we took one of the brands currently popular products”, especially when they’ve tried so hard (within reason) to get everything else just right.

That's it. 100%

I played (and greatly enjoyed) the games, but haven't seen the show, so I don't know how big this arcade scene is, but sometimes it amazes me how much work goes into constructing sets for large TV/Movie productions. I dabble in arcade restoration, so I'm aware of how much of a time and money suck it can be, and to think about how much work would go into just this one scene of one episode shows how easy it is for them to spend millions of dollars per episode on a big show these days.

I played the games when they were first released and loved them - they’ll forever be amongst my favourites. I’ve also really enjoyed the TV show.

I know very little about TV production and set design but I, too, was blown away by the amount of work and attention to detail. That the studio worked with experts in the retro arcade community was really cool. I found the description of the of the playout system for the MK machine fascinating, and reminiscent of the staged UIs I’ve read about being created in Unity and friends for other productions. Staged, but not green screen staged. And on the other hand, the description of the photo booth setup was just as fascinating - and that one was a green screen!

What a wonderful crossover career that seems to be.

They constructed houses (and completely finishing at least the camera facing exteriors, then weathered them) for several blocks on an abandoned street for one scene in the episode where Joel has to take out the sniper (very similar to the game with different story beats) and this scene took three weeks to film for only about 10-15 minutes of screen time. The mall scene had some amazing detail for just background scenery, the faux shop signs looked authentic next to historic shops.

I think a possible simple answer here is that there were bigger videogame nerds on set than pen nerds.

I think the obvious conclusion here is that canonically Papermate is operating normally, releasing products on the same schedule as they did in the real world, until 2012 at least. Presumably they use the communication advantages endowed by superior writing instruments to weather the apocalypse.

I would read a post-apocalyptic book about this.

Somewhat related, but anyone has noticed hard brigading and moderation to squash bad opinions about the show on Reddit? It sounds genius actually, if you produce content which success heavily relies on public opinion, why not hire a few PR companies to alternate the reality in reddit, youtube, etc.

Of course this is just speculation, but as a fan of the games I noticed a lot of weirdness around the reactions.

The show obv has some real budget and time constraints, which has meant so far that you don’t really see zombies (which sucks for a zombie show) and some epic scenes from the game have been either totally removed or botched.

My opinion: if they remake this show as much as the game, then it’ll eventually become great. A CGI show might make much more sense though (and seeing how good Gantz:O was, or Arcane, it’s totally doable with today’s tech). I hated the third episode because it did nothing to the story, but now I realize that the off episodes (3 and 7) are actually the best ones because at least I have no expectation.

I like that it doesn’t have many zombies. We’ve all seen loads of them and their rarity means it’s a genuine scare when they appear.

(I’ve not played the game though but I’m going to get it now)

Warning, there are a lot more zombies in the game than the show (still not like an insane number, just more). It's different in a way really. The stakes in the game are lower, you can heal yourself and all that, so having a bunch of zombies isn't really death. You can also start at a checkpoint if you die. But in the show the characters can't just heal, and the stakes are low if they can just fight them off easily and or evade them. So by making the zombies scarcer in some ways in the show, but they make those encounters extremely deadly in the show to advance the story. They play a role to telling the story, but are not the point of the story.

Also, the game is an action game, so, naturally, zombies are more plentiful or it wouldn't really be an action game so much.

Lots of feeling and few examples of manipulation. Using Occam’s razor, I think it’s more likely people are actually reacting positive to the show, rather than HBO paying some entity to brigade. The risk of being caught is high and it would cause an enormous scandal.

I personally like the show, and I’m glad it’s not just another zombie show, I’m pretty fed up with those.

As a newcomer to the story (and i believe most redditors are as well) i absolutely love that they keep the zombies on the down low and more something that is something in the background.

I'm tired of zombie slasher movies/shows. I want a good drama show with great story telling set in a post apocalyptic world, and i dont want it to be like "the walking dead".

Station Eleven might be up your alley

And The Leftovers before it

both of these are fantastic

The walking dead is everything but about zombies. I'd actually prefer it to be about zombies and the outbreak etc, not who's pregnant and who's with whom etc.

Agreed. Zombies are the best monsters, Walking Dead killed the hype because it started dragging its feet (heh) but there is never enough zombie media.

And I like that this time it's fungi. Pretty neat and scarier.

Yeah, Zombies are played out as fuck. They were played out when The Last of Us was released as a game, which is one of many reasons I didn't play it.

I did watch a let's play though and it was clear that it was the character drama that was the best part of the game, so it makes sense that's what they'd focus on for the show too.

That sounds like the early seasons of The Walking Dead. It was more a thought-exercise about what your moral lines would be if put in that situation, and exploring inter-personal conflict. Then it became... who f'ing knows what to call that.

I played the games, and I also think it makes for much better television the way they're doing it. It makes the infected much scarier if pretty much any time they're encountered, somebody dies. If the characters could just mow them down like in the game and then slap on a health kit and be fit as a fiddle, then the infected would basically be gnats.

I read an interview with the directors saying they wanted to make a good show inspired by the game rather than a straightforward adaptation. I can’t judge what they changed since I haven’t played the game, but I found this show really well done.

It’s quite well done. Especially considering the track record of game to show conversions.[1] Vignettes from the apocalypse along with the story.

I watched someone play the game and this feels a little darker. Maybe because you aren’t playing through, just trying to survive. It has had a few moments of grace but gerenally is pretty dark. I wonder what the people that worked on think of their character and cut scenes ending up on HBO.

[1. on the media podcast about game adaptations, with transcript] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...

[can video games make great tv. New yorker] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/can-the-last-o...

There have been some changes from the game that have been quite "large," notably around the cordyceps virus and how it sort of behaves. But I think they've all been very very good changes that I wish were actually in the game.

They've expanded the story of several characters, notably Bill and Frank. Their story in the game is similar, but not told really, since the game follows Joel and Ellie from their perspective, which means we don't get to see the story from Bill or Frank's perspective. So, the show has really allowed more of the story to be told because they can switch perspectives.

As a huge fan of the game, the show has been absolutely amazing to watch and I've been excited for every single episode so far. It's just all around great. I wish there was more of the show, it's just something I want more of.

If you like this type of thing, check out the podcast for the show, there's an HBO podcast hosted by Troy Baker (voice of Joel in the game, and a character in the next episode). It goes into a lot of the decision making they had to make to change the way they tell the story. Fascinating listen.

> hard brigading and moderation to squash bad opinions about the show on Reddit

Could it be as simple as the majority enjoying the show, without it being anything more nefarious going on? And if I enjoy something, I want to hang out with others who enjoy it, not someone coming in just to shit on it. That goes for most things.

Of course, it should be allowed to criticize things, and not enjoy all parts of it. But if you know the tlou2 story, it got hard brigaded by homophobes, transphobes etc. So the aversion to criticism should be seen in light of this. You never really know if it's a valid concern, or just concern trolling by someone with an anti-woke agenda.

This seems like the primary explanation IMHO. I have never played the games but I'm really enjoying the show. And regardless of the nature of the discourse surrounding TLoU, I would say Reddit strongly tends to come down hard on negativity in general, at least on most subreddits I've seen.

One could be annoyed that the show went way overboard on the "Gay Bill" story considering how far it veered off from the actual game where it was merely (and barely) implied. Anybody who brings this up then gets branded as someone who wants all the gays sent concentration camps. There is no nuance on social media.

LGBT people get very defensive about anything that doesn't support more more more representation on TV despite what is already a statistical overrepresentation in media. And even though what I have said is 100% fact, I expect it to get downvoted and flagged because that is what happens in these cases, truth be damned.

It might've been in the spirit of the game, though. Keep in mind that the release was 10 years ago. Nowadays, Naughty Dog might have been more explicit with that story line. Also, I remember some kind of backlash from TLOU 2, were some people weren't happy with the depiction of Abby.

Not sure if it’s a relevant comment, but I know personally 5 people who worked on the show in Calgary, and 4 of them are gay. It’s similar to people bashing White Lotus for having too many non-straight characters, when in fact, the showrunner is gay.

Not everything is about representation, sometimes stories, designs and sets come off as “LGBT-esque” since that’s how they depict aspects of life.

>There is no nuance on social media.

Below is a perfect example of a social media comment that is completely lacking in nuance:

>Anybody who brings this up then gets branded as someone who wants all the gays sent concentration camps.

It is quite clear from your comment here that nuance isn't really your thing. Don't be intellectually dishonest.

I can't count how many times any push back at all on the over-representation of LGBT in media is met with "you're threatening their right to exist", which is not only absurd but how would that even be accomplished if not as I said above?

I looked at a couple different subreddits and their threads for the latest episode.

/r/television has a few dozen hits for “boring”. It really was a slow episode, and combined with the previous episode it’s starting to become a slow series overall.

The one on the official subreddit? Zero. It’s eerie just how _positive_ everyone is which is hard to believe considering reactions elsewhere.

By the nature of reddit, the most popular opinion becomes the only opinion, as contrary takes get hidden or deleted. It's one of the reasons it absolutely sucks for any discussion.

One thing not mentioned by other replies is that the discussion around the story of Last of Us got very polarized when the second game dropped. There was a very loud opposition from part of the fanbase to certain plot points, themes and other decisions made in the story. This made the people who still liked it get very defensive about it.

I see that same controversy continue with the discussion around the show which, typical to reddit, manifests as downvotes, reports and name calling (woke or bigots, depending on side)

I think it's a good show. Is there brigading? There could be, but that itself wouldn't be enough if the show itself was not good enough.

Is it 9/10? Mmm, not really.

Anecdotally, I've found that generally HBO needs to pass a lower bar in order to get a higher rating than Netflix has to. So, same quality, Netflix could get a 7-8/10, whereas HBO gets 9.*/10 on IMDB.

In the same way Elden Ring "revolutionized open world games" and is a "must play game", when it doesn't really have any internal motivation to begin with.

Elden Ring hype was based on reviewers playing the first 8-10 hours and (justifiably) being very impressed with it, completely missing how repetitive, frustrating and overly hard it gets later, not to mention the terrible ending.

Reviewers I read finished the game.

It’s one of the greatest games imo.

Elden Ring repetitive, too long, and the only Soulsborne I will never finish, but it is ground breaking and has disrupted the stale genre of open world games, and the larger world of games that want to hold your hand and designed with a focus group.

Many gamers just want to get lost. Many gamers are fine with challenge. We do not need a thousand markers on the screen because nan might get lost. Nan would rather get lost in a fantasy world and fight a boss a dozen times than having an easy mode.

Elden Ring is an absolute masterpiece and deserving all of its praise.

That said, the open world is Elden Ring's biggest flaw, and I hope to return to the less accessible design of the previous games. Victory has to be earned to truly mean anything.

Elden Ring is an incredible game that takes the wonder of discovery and puts it in a fantasy open world setting in a way that makes exploration a joy.

It has been years since I felt the way I do playing it. I cannot recommend it enough.

I felt that way at the start, but it started to get silly difficult from the city onwards. And as a story-focused gamer the very abstract nature of the lore and the literally 5 second long ending was a disappointment. Agree though the feeling for the first two areas was amazing and I'm glad I played it.

This isn't really fair to ER: while it drops off a little in the last third of the main path, the endgame side area (yes that one) blew me away and is the most fun I've had in years.

Actually, the great thing about this show is that it doesn't focus so much on the actual zombies, that just gets boring fast. This show is story driven and I really like that.

Agreed. Zombies usually require a lot of suspension of disbelief and the humans to make frustrating mistakes for the zombies to do anything meaningful.

Also my wife would absolutely not watch the show if there were zombie suspense scattered through every episode.

I haven’t played the games though so maybe my expectations would have been different.

> It sounds genius actually, if you produce content which success heavily relies on public opinion, why not hire a few PR companies to alternate the reality in reddit, youtube, etc.

I assume Reddit sells (or at least enables) a ton of marketing via boosting certain topics. Especially popular culture items that can be discussed, such as sports/tv shows/movies.

If you thought Gantz:O was good, this show isn’t for you.

What makes a movie like Jaws or Alien good is you don’t really see the monster very much. A zombie show ought not to be judged by zombie volume.

You didn’t like Gantz:O?

Why would they make the show about zombies if the game wasn't really about zombies?

Just because a lot of people disagree with you, doesn't mean it's organized "brigading".

Haven't played the game in ages. But wasn't the biggest threat always other humans instead of zombies? I feel the show seems to be portraying that pretty well.

The infected are the substrate for human stories, which are the parts that make the games (and show) remarkable. What is fun in a game is likely less so in a show, so I can understand why they've minimised the infected.

I assume the other hope is that it takes a great story and makes it more accessible to a less-zombie-keen audience.

My gripe with this strategy is that in minimising the infected presence, the dream of a vaccine from Ellie's situation feels less important. What's the point if the world is rife with dangerous raiders anyway, etc.

On the other point, I seriously doubt PR companies are working to the extent you suggest. It's defensive behaviour from some fans who take issue with opinions of other fans. Usual culture-war battleground stuff.

How can one recognize brigading? Or heavy moderation? What if it's as simple as unpopular opinions catch downvote?

What you describe on reddit is more about its tyrannical moderator problem.

Each sub is essentially its own website, its own forum, on a unified UI and userbase.

And it is extraordinarily hard to create and advertise an alternative sub to an established one. If I think /r/apples is terrible, for example, it is uncommon for a breakaway /r/realapples can get traction.

So yeah, the TLoS subs are probably a bunch of fans mostly, and are wary of trolls. Legitimate criticism is just blown away because the power users of that sub don't care for it. It sucks but that's how it is on that site.

As for your opinion, I think the show is good, I like the world-building and how people cope with the details of the life.

I've had quite a lot of experience with filming around CRT's, and it's impressive how well they achieved these OLED screen replacements in this episode because while watching I was so drawn into the scene that I didn't even have the thought occur of 'how did they manage that without mad amounts of flickering'

Not sure for CRT's but TFT flickering can also be edited out afterwards, as seen here after ~22:40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivrlU73VcHw&t=1359s

The first comment was that’s not what an arcade looks like. But they are wrong, some arcades did look like that.

Pretty unrealistic Ellie could pull off a fatality despite not knowing how to use a joystick earlier

Wha? I recall learning things like this in 5, 10 minutes of play. Joysticks are intuitive.

I still have trouble.. I'm assuming they found some magazines somewhere that detail the moves so I'll give them that

Are you saying that you intuitively learned within such a short time of playing that e.g. pressing “←, →, ↓, В” or “→, →, ↑, ↑, Z” during the brief “Finish him!” makes Reptile perform a fatality? I find it hard to see the intuition here.

The creators talk about this in the companion podcast - the idea was that literature/media from these games still exists (which we can see as Ellie has the poster), and the only way you found out about fatalities anyway was via gaming publications/urban legends. Just like in the real world, nobody really learned these combos by trial and error.

Just like in the real world, nobody really learned these combos by trial and error

Good grief. There was no internet of course, and no gaming magazines in my home town.

People read instructions on the machine, and also, tried different things.

Everyone I ever met ever, learned such gaming combos, with their friends, by trial and error.

Yes, that is how it was done.

Thanks for that memory. Someone at school would whisper a combo move and you'd pencil it down and eagerly rush home from the bus later that day to try it out.

We really were guessing different combos, in rural Iowa at least.

>Everyone I ever met ever, learned such gaming combos, with their friends, by trial and error.

We grew up in alternate realities then. No one just guesses MK2 fatalities. Especially not in the 3 sec time frame you have to pull it off.

> Everyone I ever met ever, learned such gaming combos, with their friends, by trial and error.

To be fair, fatalities are not generally discoverable by trial and error, unlike combos. You have such a small window of time to enter them when they show up at the end of the match. The first time I encountered one, I had no idea what was going on and then a few seconds later it was over.

However, back then we had gaming magazines and books that revealed all the fatalities, so you could easily look them up.

I was thinking that it was also unrealistic how quickly they stopped playing. At that age, discovering these things, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get away from the screen and would have played all night with minimal talking lol

If I recall correctly there was a close-up of a nearly empty coin cup a bit later in the scene, indicating they played many many games.

I seem to remember a lot of the 90s fighting games like mortal kombat and killer instinct had the finisher combos on the side of the arcade machine. Everyone wanted to do the finishers, but internet in your pocket did not yet exist.

They imply Riley has been playing a bunch and is shown teaching Ellie how to do the fatality iirc.

TIL that old-style forums still exist. This brought back memories from 2010s. I don't know what to think about forums anymore though; they definitely do seem to be a thing of the past (esp. when users are hidden behind made-up names and portfolio pictures). Somehow, the comment sections of tiktok videos feels more authentic and alive than dedicated forums.

It's funny because I felt that way with usenet when it progressively got replaced by web based forums...

They've apparently disabled signup on the forum due to the hug -- anyone actually a member there able to grab and rehost the various cool pictures that are only thumbnails to non-members?

> Nope! we didnt trash anything at all. No arcade games were harmed in the making of this show.

Phew! :)

Interesting, apparently they made their own CRT ”shader” from scratch. I wonder why not use one of the amazing ones available in something like RetroArch?

The show is one of the biggest recent TV releases, it seems like it might be in no one's interest to save money making it.

Yes but some filters in RetroArch are academic-level simulations. CRT-Royale comes to mind. Plenty of levers are exposed to simulate a specific CRT model commonly used in Mk2 cabs. Recreating that level of quality from scratch would be significantly more time and effort.

And yet the OP's point stands.

And yet my point stands.

Link to watch the actual scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lmAsCi7Asw

a bit OT, but I've noticed over the past 20+ years that almost every movie/tv show that shows someone playing video games will play the same 40 year old sounds. I'm always hearing the arcade Defender shooting and thrusting sounds, and occasionally Atari 2600 Pacman sounds. Are these just 'public domain'? Why don't we hear more 'real' video game/arcade sounds?

Probably in 1980, someone got licenses from all the game producers to include them in a royalty-free album that became an essential item for the sound department at every production company, and soon after, game companies stopped being willing to sign such deals.

Great stuff, thanks for posting in HN!

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