This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. When the British actor Bob Hoskins agreed to star in "Super Mario Bros.," he had little sense of what he was getting into. The year was 1992, and, although the title on which the film was based had sold tens of millions of copies, a feature-length live-action adaptation of a video game had never been attempted. The movie's eventual tagline, "This ain't no game," reflected a self-conscious distance from its source material: a convoluted parallel-universe plot recast the heroes as Italian American handymen from Brooklyn and the princess they set out to save as an N.Y.U. Hoskins himself hadn't even heard of the Nintendo franchise--but when his kids learned that he would be playing Mario they excitedly showed him the game.

Game of Thrones actors Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal – who also stars in Disney's Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian – have been cast in HBO's television adaptation of blockbusting video game series The Last of Us. They will take on the roles of Ellie and Joel in the forthcoming drama. The Hollywood Reporter broke news of the adaptation last March, and since then speculation over the casting has been rife. Fans on social media initially favoured Booksmart star Kaitlyn Dever for the role of Ellie, and the actor expressed interest. Meanwhile, True Detective's Mahershala Ali was rumoured to have been approached for the role of Joel.

Note: This article contains major spoilers for "The Last of Us Part II" and 2013′s "The Last of Us." A man is shot in the chest and chokes on his own blood. A pregnant woman falls, fatally stabbed in her neck. They just wanted to reach Santa Barbara. Now they're dead because a woman needed information. The murderer, standing amid their bodies, is not the little girl you remember. Five years after the events of the first game, Ellie is cold, brutal and often merciless. Driven by revenge, the girl we knew from "The Last of Us" has morphed into something more sinister. Her optimism is dimmed, her humor muted -- her pun book, once filled with jokes, has been replaced by a journal. "The Last of Us Part II" chronicles Ellie's descent from innocence to match the darkness of the post-apocalyptic hellscape around her. The death of Joel, her guardian and traveling partner from the first game, has set Ellie's moral compass spinning as she struggles to find purpose.

But once the rest of the team read the passages, they were immediately on board, including Sony and PlayStation PR. Representation is important to him, Druckmann said, recalling how excited he gets whenever he sees a character with a Jewish Israeli identity like himself portrayed in media. Naughty Dog's philosophy is about telling "more interesting, fresh stories," and that includes narratives about minorities, sexualities and religious beliefs that aren't widely shown in video games or other areas of pop-culture, Druckmann says. It's something that continues in "The Last of Us Part II."

Just as the kaleidoscopic dramas of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, the pseudo-non-fiction murk of Alan Moore's comic From Hell and the domestic pragmatism of Jamie Oliver's 15 Minute Meals meet under the fat banner of prose, so the body of video games becomes an ever broader church. It is impossible to enforce orthodoxy in a medium where shifting technology defines the canvas. The artform now embraces work from a dizzying spectrum. A challenging time, then, for the Victoria and Albert Museum to stage its first major video game exhibition. Rather than reach into the primordial digital soup of the 1950s, or the gambling-adjacent squalor of the Pac-Man and Space Invaders arcade era, the V&A's exhibition, titled Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, begins in the mid-2000s. This was the moment at which technological advances began to alter dramatically the way in which games were designed, made and played.

By now, you've probably heard the big news: The Last of Us Part II is coming. Developer Naughty Dog took to the stage at the PlayStation Experience (PSX) event in Anaheim, California on Saturday, confirming a sequel for its critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic adventure. We will return to the harrowing lives of Ellie and Joel as they seek to survive a nightmarish pandemic – and to take some sort of revenge. Little else is known about the game, but it's the manner of that announcement, and what else happened that night, that tells us a lot about where PlayStation – and the industry at large – is going. PSX is unlike any other corporate event in the games industry – it is equal parts video game expo, marketing conference and fan convention.

At Santa Monica video game maker Naughty Dog, it doesn't take long to notice that co-responsibilities are commonplace. Pitting bosses against each other to decide on characters, gameplay and script is a key strategy the firm credits for its succession of highly-rated games. The latest, "Uncharted 4: A Thief's End," topped the charts in several countries with 2.7 million copies sold worldwide during its first week on the market this month. The 60 Sony Playstation 4 exclusive culminates Naughty Dog's series featuring fictional treasure hunter Nathan Drake. Naughty Dog has long cultivated an unusually free-flowing development process that empowers anyone at any stage to share their ideas -- and defend them.

For his last hurrah, Nathan Drake is getting some help from an unlikely ally. The jovial treasure hunter has been the star of the Uncharted series since the first entry debuted in 2007 for PlayStation 3. Nearly 10 years and 21 million copies sold later, developer Naughty Dog is ready to say goodbye to the action-adventure franchise with Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (out May 10 exclusively for PlayStation 4). During a recent presentation for the press in Los Angeles, creative director Neil Druckmann said "compromising was never an option" for Nate's swan song, hence the numerous delays the game went through before the studio firmly settled on a date. Naughty Dog wasn't satisfied with just making a larger, prettier sequel. A lot of the innovations in Uncharted 4 actually occur in between the action-packed set pieces and impressively detailed cutscenes.