Neil Druckmann , co-creator of The Last of Us series from HBO , said that after the release of the first game, Naughty Dog studios were talking about creating a spin-off about Anna, Ellie’s mother.
The developer brought this up in a press interview during a discussion about episode 9 and the return of actress Ashley Johnson , who played Ellie in the original The Last of Us. In the series finale, Ashley Johnson just played the role of Ellie’s mom in flashbacks with a pregnant Anna.
According to Druckmann, after Naughty Dog completed work on the first game, the idea for an animated short featuring Anna came up , and he even wrote a short script about how the heroine was bitten and gave birth, but did not know if Ellie got infected too.
Druckmann added that after this venture fell through, there were discussions with another studio to develop a new The Last of Us game based on this story . It was supposed that the project would reveal who Ellie’s father was, and the story was supposed to end with her birth.
Journalists, in response to this, asked him to tell about the identity of Ellie’s father, who remained a mystery after two games, but Druckmann replied that he did not want to say anything about this, since he had repeatedly made sure that the stories that he considered unsuccessful and which were never supposed to see the light, sometimes nevertheless came true.
The game’s spin-off eventually didn’t materialize either, and it wasn’t until many years later that Drumann decided to approach Ashley Johnson with the idea of making Anna’s story a part of the series.
