Good eye catching all the games. I was gonna go back later and see what I missed.

The show is of high quality with good casting and production values. I find the characters, plotlines, and pretty much every thing else exactly the same as the last 20 years worth of zombie media we've been consuming so I'll just say it doesn't exactly have any surprising or anything new to offer.

But yeah I'll keep watching until it gets boring.

I never played the video game so don't really care how exactly close to that plot line it is, it's the same as Walking Dead where people were constantly referencing the comics.

I don't think we need a Last of Us pinball machine in a world where we already have an excellent Walking Dead game.

Correction those are Chicago gaming remakes but only a pinhead would notice that! Atleast they didn't do the bells and chimes Captain marvel did with a solid state!

Well nevermind I just read they were doing bells and chimes..lol OK but, were they playing pinball wizard? That could be a deal breaker but I heard it's a pretty good show.

You can see the color dmd and colored score display on the non dmd game. Made me laugh a little that only we would notice that and nobody else

The games looked great.

And yeah we could ding them on the Remake but I think they did a good enough job on ensuring all the games were era-appropriate.

The lack of a volute on Steve Jones' Les Paul during the Sex Pistols miniseries was way more egregious!

The chimes always ruin the immersion for me. Better Call Saul had a High Speed II Getaway with chimes and I wish they'd at least tried to make some bleep bloop digital solid state sounds of some kind instead.

Why is any film production incapable of making pinball or video game footage without using chimes or Atari 2600 sounds?

They are also unable to give helicopter’s their proper sounds too.

I think the chimes are universal, since they aren't game specific....you hear that, you think pinball. How many people would recognize the sounds of AFM or any SS game.

Same for Atari - everyone has heard those sound effects.

Exactly only us crazy people can spot a game in a move and know exactly that

I assume it's a licensing thing for why they do chimes and why they rerecorded the voice callout.

It was a good episode of a good show (I won't get into how the video game part of this was different, but suffice to say...they didn't find a bunch of mint arcade machines that had sat in an arcade for twenty years)

Do another zombie game. Sure why not. TWD is excellent, but we can use another. It's been 10 years and it's the only other zombie game.

Society collapsed in 2003, but the games were color-bombed with LEDs which wasn't prominent until the 2010s. Some of the arcade games had LCD screens, but CRTs still would have been the norm in 2003. I demand realism from my fungus apocalypse show.

They haven’t yet revealed a critical side-story where CaptainNeo travels back in time to close a loop in the time-space continuum where the puke-modders are destroying all the remaining pins.

The Last of Us game took a lot of inspiration from the Walking Dead comics and show, so it's not surprising that the world feels similar - There are a couple of plotpoints in the show that diverge from TWD (for example the fungus being able to communicate across its network) but they have mostly stuck to the game storyline. Just like TWD, for good or ill, it's not about the monsters, it's about the characters. WHO DIE OFF EVERY CHANCE THEY GET! lol

Kinda agree; smarter people than me may come up with super innovative ideas for gameplay, but until I see something compelling I agree there's not much new to offer. I would totally go for a re-themed TWD re-release though!

As counterintuitive as this seems, I actually appreciate the chimes since it implies they actually took the time to think about pinball sounds. Modern era games sound just like video games, so in a scene like that, someone took the time to say "that pinball needs sounds", and I think that's great.

Season one/the first game is basically a road trip story. So have a map and progress across America, like Jurassic Park. Have stops in Boston, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Wyoming, Colorado, Washington (season two will probably be in and around Seattle).

Without getting too spoilery for the game and what they'd do for season two, it is more of a revenge story and chasing someone around.

They could reuse the drop target concept from TWD as the game, and the show to a minor extent, is about scavenging for supplies/weapons.

Have an infected bash toy

Yep. People are going to be SO pissed off at season 2. Wonder if S1 ends like the game, or they'll introduce a cliffhanger to really piss people off

My first thought on this was it must be some sort of licensing concern?

I bet it had more to do with just getting the sound correct in that scene. Almost all the audio in a movie or tv is re-recorded (not the dialogue all the time, but WAY more than you realize). Being able to have separate sounds allows the sound designer to create the exact layering they want (what if the callout is way too loud?). I bet it was just easier to have someone re-record that quickly than try to get the original audio (and like you said there still may have then been some licensing issue - you know Planetary would have been ALL of that trying to get their pound of flesh). So all that together: re-record it. And that's another thing I appreciate - they could have just left it out! Somebody on that show likes pinball.

Yeah I find asyncronous / anachronistic sounds to be distracting and annoying, but at some point you just have to understand and accept the process and how things like that happen.

I agree to an average viewer, "chimes and bells = pinball" way more than any otherwise generic digital sound effect or callout.

And it also depends on context: If this show or episode were explicitly about pinball, I'm sure they would have put in some effort to sync things up. But it wasn't: pinball was a mere background prop. As someone else said, be glad it was highlighted with its sole distinct sound pattern to stand out, as opposed to being lost entirely.

Doing that required no more than going into whatever stock sound footage library was licensed or handy, and pulling out the "pinball" file for mixing into the audio track. Same thing that gives every movie the Wilhelm Scream, and what I now call the "Willhelm Honk" (scene where a semi-truck needs to make its presence known? Prepare for the same weakly dopplered "Bronnnnt.... BRAAAWWWWWWNT!" sound effect you've heard a million times)... or how about the Wilhelm Mouse Click as heard every time a character interfaces with any sort of computer UI in a commercial, TV show or movie, sometimes even when there's no damn mouse??

My favorite pinball sound in a TV show was the episode of Rick & Morty where they went to Blips & Chits the first time. It was actually kind of the opposite: what was meant to be "generic arcade filler sound" was the unmistakable sound of WMS Space Shuttle droning along. Like, WOW that can't possibly be in any sort of stock sound effects library so somebody went to the effort to do that for reasons I can only guess (convenience? homage? just knew and liked that sound?)

Seeing MK2 front and center in this series brought a tear to my eye for sure, that game is the high watermark of the Arcade Era I grew up in being born in 78'.

Also, watching the episode with my 13 year old son who geeked out when Attack from Mars was shown, was pretty awesome...It was definitely an homage to us gamers.

I don't watch TV so no idea about this show but whenever you hear pinball sounds in film it's always the same bells and chimes, you'll know because you can hear a bad plunger on the chimes go " thunk", was pointed out to me by the pirate and now I hear it every time. You'd think someone would figure that out but I guess not.
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100%!! My kid, who hates pinball pretty much, recognized AFM from having played it at the Silverball in Asheville, NC

I mean, guns don't even sounds like they do in movies/tv, we expect pinball machines to be accurate?

you're trying to tell me gun silencers aren't magical devices that make a gunshot whisper quiet?

LOL

And guns don't rattle or constantly make racking noises when you aim them at people.

I thought the arcade scene was cool the little inaccuracies didn't bother me whatsoever.

I don't think they bother most of us, being that we understand these games more than 99% of the people we pick the inaccuracies apart like anybody else does with other hobbies.

Somebody said it above with guns, the inaccuracies in almost every action movies drives anybody that is into guns insane. I think John Wick is one of the most accurate movies from a tactical perspective

A lot of sound effects in film aren't technically accurate.

Punching sound effects aren't usually how actual punches sound. Pulling a sword/knife from a sheath does not actually result in a metal-on-metal sound. Various animal calls and noises are usually incorrect, such as rattlesnakes, frogs (not all frogs croak or say "ribbit"), and eagles (usually a hawk call). Computers and server rooms actually don't have beep and boop sounds--usually just the sound of running case fans or HVAC systems. I'm sure there's a whole lot more.

There are also foley artists who specifically try to make sound effects either to serve the scene, to match the visual, or to match what the audience expects to hear.

The most annoying sound effect that's misused is a dirt bike sound. Most scenes will go back and forth from a 2 stroke engine, to a 4 stroke engine.
They are completely different sounding engines and I can always tell what the bike sound should be.

Terrific thread on KLOV as a couple members detail their amazing contribution to the scene. Mostly vid related.

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/last-of-us-arcade-scene.518996/

Interesting comment about LCD vs CRT, the practical issues of filming the scene:

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/last-of-us-arcade-scene.518996/post-4642458

So ChanceKJ and I were brought in by HBO to work on this arcade for the show. Theres lots to unpack, so I'll be brief for now until i have some more time to explain some more stuff.

Inside the Mortal Kombat II cabinet was actually a 46 inch OLED panel that we rotated 90 degrees. The gameplay footage was all played and captured ahead of time by myself while Chance and I worked through the script, making sure we got all the moves down that they wanted to show (fatalities included). I treated the footage with scanlines, some curvature, and rounded the corners off so it looked a little more like a real CRT. We programmed an interface we could control remotely on the day that would instantly play a clip from the game on demand and basically played it back in real time with the actors as they shot the scene. So when you see them drop one coin in, thats an individual clip, 2nd coin, another clip, character selection, yet another clip and so on.

Sync'ing a camera to CRT displays can be done, but you really can only guarantee it'll sync with a few at a time. Some games stray slightly or drift, so even if you get the camera to sync, you'll lose the CRT and start to get some bad flicker at some point. For Cinematographers, there is a rule of 180 degree shutter. So if you're shooting at 24fps, 180 degree shutter angle will put you at 1/48 shutter speed. This is what gives you the cinematic look and feel and blur that we're all used to. You can change shutter angle slightly but it will impact the feeling of the movement of the shot. Obviously CRT refresh rate doesn't divide into 24/48 very well, so thats why you get the flicker.

While we got Mortal Kombat to MOSTLY look like a CRT on camera, it was an expensive process (time and money) and we did do it for a few other games in the arcade, but time was not on our side to make it happen for every game. Some games we killed the monitor completely (like the Asteroids deluxe), the thought was that after sitting for a bunch of years, a good chunk of the games are not going to quite work right. We were ready to kill Black Widow, but the director liked the look of it, so it was kept.

Some games we programmed to have a glitch or sync issue in. We had a few games legit shit the bed. There is a shot early on in the arcade scene where you can see a Buck Hunter game with a failed hard drive in the background and the screen is flickering. Totally plausible and we just ran with it!

A comment on what happened to the games and where the pins came from:
https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/last-of-us-arcade-scene.518996/post-4642465

Nope! we didnt trash anything at all. No arcade games were harmed in the making of this show.

there were a half dozen games that were brought in from Toronto before we got involved, they are all scratch built LCD versions of games like Robotron, Galaga, Tetris, Centipede. We didnt love them, but we had to use them to fill up space in the arcade (if you watch carefully you'll see there are actually TWO robotrons - one real cabinet, and then the fake one behind Ellie when they are busting the change machine open). The rest of the games were brought in by myself or Chance, a handful of pinball from some friends in town, and a shitload of Atari games from another local collector.

And what didn't make the cut:
https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/last-of-us-arcade-scene.518996/post-4642483

Another fun fact. It is quite expensive to license some games to show in TV/Movies. Williams and Midway stuff seemed to be most expensive, while Atari stuff was super reasonable. Older stuff is easier to license.

We had some pinball machines and arcade games not make the cut because they were too expensive to license, or the IP owner wasn't licensing that particular game for that use at that particular time. We had a Ms Pac-Man that wouldnt clear because they were not allowing a license at that time. Golden Axe was axed, no BurgerTime, NBA Jam, or TMNT either. WWF Pinball, Evel Knievel, Comet. New titles from the 90s were all mostly too expensive to license or use, let alone trying to find some of them as most conversion games were all restored to original around here. Also forget about doing anything with Nintendo. Some licenses only allowed for showing the game in the deep background, or couldn't feature game play, but only attract modes (Street Fighter II for example). Its a complicated world, and you only have so much time and money to get it all done.

I had a feeling you guys would notice that they were CGC games.

But you have to give me some credit in that I had the foresight to at least turn the Color DmDs to Orange

Oh, side note: ALL the sound in games were off or disabled during filming. This also included a couple games that had fans, we pulled them out to assist sound.

Well that settles that question! Phenomenal work, that scene was excellent !

If they wanted all proper era games with CRTs they should have filmed at Arkadium Retro Arcade or Short Circuit Arcade in Edmonton... Guys did a good thou was nice to see that scene for sure in the show.

They don't want CRTs. It's too hard to film them. The cycle rates don't sync up.

Hah! I said to my wife when they walked up to the Mortal Combat game that it wasn't a 'real' game due to the screen and how it appeared. Of course I don't know all the intricacies of it, but we've seen enough over the years to know the difference.

Also, I thought 1) not nearly enough dust on the games for the time that had passed --- but it's possible that girl had wiped them off. 2) way more of them worked than I would have thought after sitting that long.

Also, the CGC thing wasn't really an issue for me because of the time frame (I don't recall if they call out the year in the show) but assuming it happend in present day, there would have been more CGC's in the arcades than originals.

Ah makes sense, unfortunate but I guess they aren’t going for true authenticity anyway as the majority of people that watch the show won’t know or care…

Society collapsed in 2003, but it is a fun idea to imagine pinball distribution continuing in spite of food shortages, transportation challenges, and so on.

sure on actual film but with modern digital cameras, it's easy to set the capture rate to the same as the monitor. Even most modern cell phones let you do this.

Then in editing they can cut the frame rate back to a normal 30FPS

Kinda - but This is absolutely 100% not acceptable in a tv/film situation. Last of Us is filmed on an Arri Alexa Mini, which has a set number of frame rates you can select - none of which would match up to a CRT's constantly changing refresh rate (remember it's analog) https://www.arri.com/resource/blob/302206/6e6b2cd32c68ca40b8027da40c375a5e/placeholder-alexa-mini-lf-recording-formats-table-data.jpg

Maybe I'm mistaken, but most raster CRTs have a fixed refresh rate (they may offer more than one and you can select, but it isn't changing on the fly). The video game isn't necessarily at a fixed frame rate, but that isn't the CRT refresh rate

I believe vector CRTs use variable refresh rate, and now variable refresh rate LCDs are starting to become common in gaming

It's not the refresh rate being fixed or variable, it's that analog CRTs are not precise; you can set your camera frame rate to match, but the CRT will eventually drift and it will start to look bad again. That's what I meant about the CRT being constantly changing. It's "fixed" but drifts all over the place. We don't notice when playing a game, but the camera needs it to be really really stable.

LCDs/LEDs/OLEDs lock in and are much more precise. Just logistically, every minute on set costs A LOT money, and you need to be shooting as many of those minutes as possible. Nobody is going to spend thousands of dollars wait for "CRT resync everybody!" when there's really no practical reason for it. It already takes way too long to set up again after a shot; I've been on shows where the director is literally sitting with a stopwatch counting the money. Ironically, those guys never work again and the ones who blow up the budget usually do. Hollyweird is.

Plus, you're also looking at *multiple* monitors. It's really difficult to sync with just one; basically impossible for several all in the same frame.