The Last of Us: A Response

In the last 48 hours there has been an article published accusing the Swedish branch of Gamereactor of sexism, after the character of Ellie from The Last of Us was removed from an image that featured as their latest print magazine cover.

Gamereactor Sweden had already responded to the issue on their site, but to confirm for non-Swedish readers (and to avoid any mistranslation that Google Translate would bring), we wanted to reiterate the point:

The decision to remove Ellie from the image in question was purely a design-orientated one. Ultimately it's that simple. In the past similar design decisions have been made. Sweden's Editor Petter Hegevall clarified the point:

"This was a design question. We felt Ellie looked like she was a cut-out in the original picture and was lit strangely compared to Joel. She looked... just a little bit off. So we took that layer out - which was possible since Naughty Dog left her as a moveable layer. In the end it made for a more clean and stylish cover.

In the end, we did a Army of Two cover without Salem, A Jak & Daxter cover without Daxter, A Super Mario Bros U cover without Luigi and a Ratchet & Clank cover without Ratchet. It's choice in design. Nothing else."

Gamereactor Sweden was contacted directly after the magazine was published, and the team provided the same explanation at that point.

It's also worth noting that Swedish readers selected the cover in question from a potential four choices put to readership vote - one of which included different artwork from The Last of Us with Ellie still in the frame. That selection can be seen below:

You can read our review of The Last of Us here.