-i remember when I first walked onto the mocap stage.
I was nervous.
You're surrounded by 180 cameras.
I was like, "If I can just
kind of, you know, not get nervous
and bring what I have to the table, I know I'm Ellie."
-Damn it.
I'm not like her, you know.
-Ashley Johnson told me more than
once someone has come up to her and said, "Because of Ellie,
I had the courage to come out to my parents."
To give people that is a great bonus,
but the biggest motivation
is just to tell more interesting stories.
-One of the things that makes this world interesting
is all of our characters -- Nobody makes it to 15 innocent.
-I went to school at Carnegie Mellon,
and we had a project where we had to pitch
"Night of the Living Dead" game concept to George Romero,
and then he would pick one of those pitches
and then we'd a semester developing it.
So I developed this pitch about a cop protecting this girl.
She lost her dad.
He lost his kid. I was really excited by it.
It had elements of "Ico" and stuff from "Sin City,"
but George picked something else.
And we finished "Uncharted 2,"
and we started making initially what was a "Jak and Daxter"
reboot, and then we decided to do our own thing,
and that's when Ellie and Joel really started taking shape.
To me, the intriguing thing about the concept,
even from the beginning,
was to have these somewhat stereotypical roles of you
have this kind of gruff protector,
and then Ellie being this sort of damsel in distress,
and then really messing with those archetypes.
-In the first game, we got to know this girl.
We fell in love with her.
She was this scrappy, punk-rock 14-year-old who was, like,
learning how to shoot a gun for the very first time.
And even in her short little life,
she had already so much devastation and loss,
but there was still a lot of excitement
about the future and optimism and hope.
-Go on. -Hey, there.
-She is driven by wrath and guilt and hurt,
and shows no fear in the face of combat.
-I have a lot of anger in me. I think with Ellie,
I'm able to sort of use that in a weird way.
When I step into those shoes,
I don't feel like I'm playing a character.
-So don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else
because the truth is, I would just be more scared.
-It was funny because at the time
when we had to name her,
I was about to have my first kid, my daughter,
so I had a list of names, and, like,
"Ellie" was really a close one that I almost named my daughter,
and I was like, "Oh."
There's like this -- I like to find things
that I have an emotional attachment to
and then put them in a story,
and then I find myself more invested because of it.
We start to see Ellie grow up and mature
over the course of the first game,
and in some ways, become corrupt by the violence.
What happens when this character grows up?
And I started thinking about Ellie as a sort of action hero
in this post-pandemic reality.
It feels like, "Oh, we could spend, like,
a lot of time exploring this character
and how she evolves, kind of deconstruct her going forward.
-So much about this game is how much we think we know
about somebody, and then learning through --
getting to know somebody better, spending more time with them,
seeing them in different situations,
that we were judging them superficially
and that everybody is much richer and complex.
-With the first game, that was the first video game
that I've ever done.
With this game in particular, it became a new measurement
for me, where I was like,
"Oh, I didn't know I could get there emotionally."
-Between the two games, she's settled down,
and she gets to worry about things beyond surviving.
She gets to worry about flirting with her best friend
and when she'd gonna go sledding
and what she's gonna watch with Joel.
And she gets to feel what it is to feel a stable universe.
But this kid grew up in a world where there were always runners.
There were always Infected.
She always had to worry about it.
That's going to define a person.
-I'm gonna find and I'm gonna kill every last one of them.