Warning: Spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 2 ahead If you were shocked Sunday night to see Pedro Pascal’s Joel get brutally murdered to death by Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby and her crew of Fireflies from Salt Lake City in the latest episode of the HBO’s “The Last of Us,” you were not the only one who was blindsided. Fans of the game have been talking about the shocking decision, first made in the TV adaptation’s source material “The Last of Us: Part II,” since its release in 2020. Like many things during the COVID pandemic, the sequel to the original Naughty Dog and PlayStation video game was delayed as the company’s staff adjusted to working from home. The game would ultimately be released in June of that year. But two months before its release, creator Neil Druckmann’s worst nightmare came true. “We had to come out and say the game can’t come out on this date. And we don’t even know when it will come out. It’s delayed indefinitely. So a lot of our most hardcore fans are angry with us,” Druckmann recalled in the 2024 documentary “Grounded II: The Making of the Last of Us Part II”. “Around the same exact time, we started having these leaks.” Naughty Dog saw videos of their internal meetings while making the game surface publicly, which were stored at the company’s headquarters on an internal server. The source of the leak would turn out to be a fan in the Netherlands, who was able to download terabytes of videos through a back door in the server. Once discovered, Naughty Dog quickly closed off access, but doing so led to a “fatal error.” “This person put out everything,” Druckmann said. At first, the released scenes, which were out of order, were “relatively benign.” But then Joel’s death was leaked, adding more fuel to a fire that was already raging from angry fans on social media. “I get this text from [Naughty Dog president Evan Wells], ‘they just posted Joel stuff,’ and my heart sinks. I can’t even describe this feeling. It’s just this like dread. It’s almost like you just heard someone you care about died. That’s the closest I could compare it to,” Druckmann recalled at the time. “I thought Troy [Baker] would be looking at that and be like, ‘You see, you were wrong’.” “He said, ‘Do you think we did the right thing?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, Neil, I have not played the game yet,’” Baker, who voiced and did the motion capture for Joel in the video games, said. “I was livid. I was real angry.” Ashley Johnson, who played Ellie, said there were “a lot of days I would just cry” following the leaks. Laura Bailey, who played Abby, would receive countless death threats and threats of violence. “The worst of it, the really hardcore death threats got passed along, and they made sure that they were not anyone that lived close by,” Bailey said. “They were threatening my son, you know, who was born during all of it. It was rough.” Druckmann said he was put into a “deep depression” after being bombarded with hundreds of negative comments, death threats and antisemitic remarks, adding it was “the lowest point of my life.” Ultimately, “The Last of Us: Part II” would go on to win more than 320 Game of the Year Awards following its release. As of January 2023, “The Last of Us” franchise collectively sold more than 37 million copies, with the sequel selling over 4 million copies in its release weekend and over 10 million by 2022. But Druckmann said the traumatic experience for himself and his team and the hate they got due to the leaks will stay with him forever. “I can’t even describe how angry I was of what the damage this person did to us. I want them punished in every sort of way. I wanted this to be this villain. And this person is like in their 20s or whatever, they live with their parents, and it’s a fan,” Druckmann said. “When we delayed the game indefinitely, what they said, is like, ‘I wanted to force Naughty Dog’s hand. I wanted to force them to release the game. So I thought, if I just put out all the videos, eventually they’ll put out the game,’ which was never an option for us. And I remember sitting there, sitting in my anger, and then like slowing down and just going ‘Okay, if anybody should take the lesson from ‘The Last of Us Part II,’ it should probably be us. Just let it go.’” New episodes of “The Last of Us” air Sundays on HBO and stream on Max.