I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Past lives indeed!

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

This week, Matt wrote about some of his early thoughts regarding the HBO adaptation of the bestselling game The Last of Us, and the strangeness of watching such a highly faithful prestige TV version of something he’s already experienced in an interactive format. Definitely a good opportunity to revisit one of the trailers for the game’s original release ten years ago!

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Been there, done that

There are some gamers who seem to seek validation from some game that they spent dozens of hours on being adapted for cinema or TV. Is it because Roger Ebert put down our hobby decades ago when he was still with us? (Okay, to be fair, a certain someone who shall remain me had some definite opinions on Ebert’s verdict at the time and wrote an article in response that got translated into Italian and published; at this point I wouldn’t understand that article if I tried to read it.) So, when HBO announced a few years ago that it’d bought the rights to adapt the bestselling game The Last of Us: hey, how much more validation can you get? The network that ushered in the Golden Age of Television with modern classics such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood – and, more than that, the series runner would be Craig Mazin, whose outstanding miniseries Chernobyl had made people forget that he’d written the third and fourth instalment in the Scary Movie series.

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Press A to Design/Play/Disrupt

Two cloaked figures sliding down a glittering dune, singing to each other. A hunter in Victorian garb, facing down a gigantic hairy creature on a dilapidated bridge. A grizzled middle-aged man and a young woman making their way through a ruined, overgrown city. Grinning figures, half-human, half-squid, swimming salmon-like through splotches of paint. Hundreds of extraterrestrial worlds, the skies above them in hundreds of different hues. An eagle, half visible through the trees, half concealed by the empty gaps between them.

Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt

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