Following the success of the HBO adaptation, "The Last of Us" has recently been hailed as one of the greatest stories in gaming, with Neil Drachman as its creator. But if you check out the credits on Mobygames (open in new tab), you'll notice that the game director is actually a guy named Bruce Straily. And despite his deep ties to the game and his long career at Naughty Dog, Straley said in an interview with the LA Times (opens in new tab) that he is completely excluded from the show.

Straley was an early hire at Naughty Dog, the 15th employee, according to what he said on Twitter (opens in new tab) in 2014, and is credited on games such as CTR: Crash Team Racing and the original Jak and Daxter trilogy In 2007, he was one of two art directors on Uncharted: He was later promoted to game director on Uncharted 2, for which Druckman was lead designer. The two then teamed up for "The Last of Us," with Straily as game director and Drachman as creative director.

After The Last of Us, he went on to direct Uncharted 4, but never returned to work on The Last of Us 2, announcing his departure from the studio in 2017.

"After leading three very demanding projects and an extended absence from the office, I gradually realized that my energy was focused in a different direction and that this was a signal that it was time to move forward," Straley wrote on the Naughty Dog blog (opens in new tab)

Since then.

Since then, according to the Times, the relationship between Straley and Naughty Dog has been "strained," with Straley launching a new studio called Wildflower Interactive (opens in new tab) in 2022. And while Drakman is visibly credited on the HBO show, Straley's name is nowhere to be found, and he doesn't appear to be getting any money from the show either. "[It] is an argument for unionization that someone who participated in the co-creation of that world and those characters is not getting credit or pennies for the work they put into it," says Straily. 'Maybe there needs to be a union in the video game industry to protect creators.'

The exclusion is especially puzzling (I imagine) given that HBO's "The Last of Us" is a faithful recreation (open in new tab) of a 2013 video game. And as Kotaku (opens in new tab) pointed out, Straley was given special credit for "contributing to the development of The Last of Us" in the "The Last of Us Part 1" remake.

Unionization (opens in new tab) and credit granting (opens in new tab) have become a major problem for the gaming industry in recent years, and while this is not the most egregious example of a game developer being frozen out by his former employer, it is definitely not a good look. We have reached out to Sony and HBO for comment and will update if we hear back.