“The first season is the events of the first game—and you can tell, if you have played the game, from watching the marketing materials that we’re also covering the events of the Left Behind [downloadable content],” Mazin said. “I think that the amount of story that remains that we have not covered would be more than a season of television. So assuming we can keep going forward, the idea would be to do more than just one more season. But this isn’t the kind of show that is going to be seven seasons.”

Mazin is referring to The Last of Us Part II, released in 2020, seven years after the original game. Both releases follow the lives of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey); in the first game, they traverse a zombie-infested United States for a chance to save the world. In the second game, the pair deal with the fallout from that trip. The implication here is Mazin wants to tell that over two seasons. So, season one is game one and seasons two and three are game two. The story is all out there for anyone to read about or play, a fact Mazin said they took full advantage of in crafting the show.

“We have the benefit of something that Neil didn’t have when he was making the game initially, which was knowing what the Left Behind DLC was and knowing where the second game goes and understanding a little bit more about the fuller context,” Mazin said. “So we certainly took advantage of understanding that fuller context when we plotted out this season.”

Mazin is very clear, though. For him, The Last of Us is the two games and the DLC. That’s it. And though fans have certainly wondered if Druckmann was working on part three, or if he could provide major future story beats a la George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones, it seems none of that is in the cards should the show reach the end of the second game.

“Unless some miraculous thing happened and the video game production was accelerated by 1000% and the third game magically came out,” Mazin said through a fit of laughter, “I am not interested in going beyond the existing source material. As a viewer, I have no problem watching shows that just keep going and going and going. No problem. But as a writer, I don’t want to be in the position of spinning plates to just spool out season after season of stuff. To me, it’s important that things are purposeful, and if they’re purposeful, that means they have endings. That means everything you do is carefully selected and chosen, not just there to keep going.”