The year was 2013, and the release of a hotly anticipated zombie-apocalypse video game was on the horizon.
The game, called The Last of Us, invited players to explore what then seemed a fanciful scenario: a world devastated by a pandemic in which a pathogen kills millions of people.
Unlike in many apocalypse fictions, the pathogen responsible wasn’t a bacterium or a virus, but a fungus called Cordyceps that infects humans and takes over their brains.
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The writers at game studio Naughty Dog, based in Santa Monica, California, were inspired by real fungi — particularly Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, known as the zombie-ant fungus. The fungus infects insects and releases chemicals into the animals’ brains to change their behaviour. Ahead of the game’s release, Naughty Dog turned to scientists, including behavioural ecologist David Hughes, a specialist in zombie-ant fungi (he named one after his wife), to field questions from the media about the fungal and pandemic science that inspired the story. Hughes, who is at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, has since moved to studying climate change and food security.
The Last of Us spawned a sequel game in 2020 and a critically acclaimed television show, the second season of which concludes on 25 May on HBO.
Hughes spoke to Nature about his experience consulting on the game and why COVID-19 changed our appetite for zombies.
What was your involvement with the game?
Naughty Dog studios asked me and a few other people who were notable in this space, including psychologists, to talk about whether we could have a global pandemic. Of course, in the intervening period, we all learnt that the answer was yes.
They asked us to go around Europe and do a series of lectures to stave off critique and provide support to the idea that infections that jump from one species into another — zoonotic infections — are not only possible, but actually they’re the predominant mechanism by which humans are infected with new parasites that cause disease. I had the good fortune to go to the studios and see the artistry that was involved, and meet the team and the voice actors of the video game.
What did you make of the science in the game?
I was really…
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