It all started with a tweet. Or an X. Or whatever we’re calling it these days.

Santa Monica resident Neil Druckmann, a game developer, co-studio president and head of creative at Naughty Dog, was visiting Universal Studios Hollywood two years ago and after a day of fun he shared on Twitter that he’d love to see his video game, “The Last of Us,” turned into a maze at the theme park’s annual Halloween Horror Nights.

“I was just here, having a blast with my family, and I have just been a fan of theme parks since I was a child, and horror, too, so I just put it out there in a tweet and I got a response,” Druckmann said with a laugh as he stood alongside HHN creative director and executive producer John Murdy in front of the façade of one of the eight walk-thru attractions that make up the 2023 HHN season.

“This was the first haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights that was birthed through Twitter, so something good came out of social media,” Murdy added. Universal Studios Hollywood’s annual scare-a-thon begins on Thursday, Sept. 9 and continues select evenings through Tuesday, Oct. 31.

Adapting the game

“The Last of Us” is an action-adventure video game set in a post-apocalyptic world that follows main characters Joel and Ellie as they dodge humans infected by a fungal virus — known as runners, stalkers and clickers — and a hostile group known as The Hunters. It was released in 2013 and received critical acclaim as it picked up several gaming awards and went on to become one of the best-selling video games of all time. A clear fan-favorite, the game has been turned into a graphic novel, a tabletop game, a wildly popular television series on HBO that aired earlier this year and now it’s a walk-through attraction at both Universal Studios Hollywood and Orlando.

The maze begins at a quarantine zone in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Joel and Ellie have wrecked their vehicle and they’re forced to fight their way through the city.

“That was actually the first part we built for the game, so it felt very appropriate for us with our first Halloween Horror Nights — maybe first of many, who knows — but we thought, let’s start with Pittsburgh and build a sequence that starts with Joel and Ellie and you have to work with them to survive until the end,” Druckmann said.

“It’s surreal to see it here,” he continued as he looked at the signage and a few cleverly placed Easter eggs from the game that rabid fans are sure to spot that are scattered at the entrance. “Everything looks so authentic and it’s all from the game. The spray paint, that was reviewed by our art director and he’s given very minute notes, the overgrowth (of vegetation), all of it is so authentic that there’s a sense of pride when you walk through it. The people who worked on this are clearly fans and have honored what was done before them by a group of very talented video game developers.”

Murdy and his team did a deep dive into the game to make sure to get this right. Though he admits he’s not skilled at these types of games — he’s now 56 years old and claims his young daughters now school him on more modern gaming devices — he was grateful for the endless hours of video footage of others playing the game on YouTube so he could hone in on certain scenes.

“I never appreciated these people until now,” Murdy said with a laugh. “Thank you for making a video that’s every iteration of every single scene in the game. The one I focused on was 12 hours long and I went through that multiple times. It took me a week and I took millions of notes.”

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While the objective of the maze is to have numerous scares, Druckmann said the storytelling was especially important to emphasize within this particular attraction. Though there are plenty of horror elements incorporated into the game, there’s a lot of heart to the storyline that highlights Joel and Ellie’s father-daughter-like relationship as they try to survive the elements of this world together. He worked with Murdy to write some new dialogue for the main characters to go along with some of their most memorable lines from the game. For the maze, they also called in original voice actors Troy Baker, who voices Joel, and Ashley Johnson, as Ellie, to record the new dialogue.

“They are those characters,” Druckmann said. “They helped create those characters, which is why, again, if we’re going for authenticity, it had to be them.”

As the game celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, Druckmann said he can’t think of a better way to mark the occasion than with this attraction.

“It’s still wild to me how much attachment people have to this game,” he said. “It’s been 10 years since it came out and people constantly come up to me and say ‘This has changed my life’ and ‘You have no idea what these characters mean to me.’ And so this felt kind of like a gift back to fans in a way, like let’s put you in the game to experience it.”

More thrilling mazes

Aside from The Last of Us, there are seven more mazes, three scare zones, live entertainment and the Terror Tram on the backlot.

There’s maze based on the latest film in the “Evil Dead” franchise dubbed Evil Dead Rise, which focuses on the curse of The Book of the Dead. The theme park is revisiting “The Exorcist” franchise as well with The Exorcist: Believer. Based on the forthcoming film of the same title, which is directed by David Gordon Green (who directed the three more recent “Halloween” films) and produced by Blumhouse’s Jason Blum, it follows the familiar story of possession and the unleashing of evil forces on an unsuspecting family. The maze will serve as a live preview for the film, which hits theaters on Oct. 13.

“Stranger Things” is also back into the fold, but this time event producers are focusing on the fourth season of the popular Netflix series and the curse of Vecna. Chucky of the “Child’s Play” franchise will finally star in his own fun house of horrors in Chucky: Ultimate Kill Count and, of course, the Universal Monsters are back in a Universal Monsters: Unmasked maze featuring Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Invisible Man.

The original concept maze Holidayz in Hell, which explores the true terrors of annual holidays, is making a comeback and Monstruos: The Monsters of Latin America will make its park debut and explore Latin American folklore to tell the stories of the Tlahuelpuchi, La Lechuza and  El Silbón.

Halloween Horror Nights

When: Select evenings Sept. 7-Oct. 31

Where: Universal Studios Hollywood, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City

Tickets: General admission tickets start at $74; Universal Express start at $209; Universal Express Unlimited start at $249; After 2 p.m. Day/Night combos are $149-$329; the new separate Early Access Ticket, which provides access to select haunted houses before the event opens starting at 5:30 p.m., start at $10 (regular ticket purchase required); R.I.P. Tours are $379 and up; Frequent Fear passes start at $209 and Ultimate Fear passes start at $329. All ticket types are available at universalstudioshollywood.com.