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Naughty Dog built such a detailed guitar-playing system for Ellie that players quickly figured out they could recreate actual songs on it, note for note, using the touchpad to strum and a chord wheel to fret. People have pulled off everything from Nirvana to Metallica to a fingerpicked take on A-ha's Take On Me, all without a single line of code being changed.
Somewhere in Part 2's dialogue, Joel and Ellie bond over a fictional action-movie franchise called Curtis and Viper 2, a series that only exists inside this world. It clearly meant something to the writers too, because the HBO adaptation brought the same made-up franchise back when Dina mentions wanting to watch it with Joel.
Joel gifting Ellie an astronomy book isn't just a sentimental prop. Neil Druckmann has said the whole detail exists because Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie, wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. In the same breath, he's explained that Joel's love of music and singing comes from the fact that Troy Baker started out as an actual musician before he ever voiced a video game character.
There's a cut sequence called Jackson Party that was trimmed from the finished game but resurfaced as one of the Lost Levels in the remaster. It shows Ellie more settled into her life before everything falls apart, including a scene that finally explains where her tattoo actually came from.
Bruce Straley, who co-directed the original game alongside Neil Druckmann, left Naughty Dog in 2017 and had no involvement in the sequel. His shoes were filled by Anthony Newman and Kurt Margenau, with Newman having previously worked as the melee combat designer on the first game.
The multiplayer mode Factions was a genuine fan favourite from the first game, but Naughty Dog made a deliberate call to leave it out of Part 2 entirely so the whole team could pour every ounce of effort into the single-player campaign. They were clear that Factions wasn't gone for good, just parked for a while.
By the time all the dust settled on the 2020 awards season, The Last of Us Part 2 had picked up more Game of the Year wins than any other game in history, knocking The Witcher 3 off the top spot it had held for years.
This game shipped with more than 60 individual accessibility settings, covering everything from custom button remapping to on-screen cues for hard-of-hearing players. It went on to win the very first Innovation in Accessibility award handed out at The Game Awards, a category that basically got created because of how far Naughty Dog pushed things.
Naughty Dog's own team sits at around 350 people, but the finished game credits roughly 2,169 developers spread across 14 different studios who chipped in on everything from animation to localisation over the years it took to make.
This was easily the biggest launch of 2020 across both physical and digital sales, moving over four million copies in its opening weekend alone and becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 exclusive of all time.
