Cancelled The Last of Us multiplayer game was agonisingly close to completion
First-party Sony PlayStation studio Naughty Dog cancelled The Last of Us online multiplayer game in 2023. Now we know how close it was to being ready.
The one-time director of the sadly-cancelled The Last of Us online multiplayer video game wasn’t all that far from completion when studio Naughty Dog pulled the plug.
Speaking on LEL Podcast, Vinit Agarwal has revealed the agonising circumstances behind the game’s cancellation in late 2023. Agarwal said the spin-off was “80 per cent complete” when the celebrated studio decided to cancel the project amid a general downturn in the gaming industry.
Agarwal, who worked on the game for seven years, said it was doing “really, really well internally”, but other priorities won out. Namely, the game that studio president Neil Druckmann was making.
On the podcast posted this week he said (via Eurogamer): “A decision had to be made. Make this game, or make this next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company. So, kind of naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to pick the game which was the soul bread-and-butter of the studio, rather than this experimental game I was working on. I believe it was going to be really big, but unfortunately couldn’t see the light of day.”
“It was soul crushing. To find out it was getting cancelled 24 hours before [the cancellation] was announced to the public, that’s how I found out the game was being cancelled. It was just unfortunate and they had to do that because they have to control the messaging.”
The director was released by the company after the cancelled product, but maintains the cancellation itself was “ten times worse”. Argarwal has since moved to Japan to found his own Studio.
Whether we’ll see more from The Last of Us remains to be seen. Naughty Dog is currently busy with Intergalactic, but has hinted there may yet be a third edition of the popular PlayStation franchise, which has risen to even greater heights since the live action adaptation on HBO. Perhaps one day, the 80% complete game could be completed?
Chris Smith
