Naughty Dog closed its annual The Last of Us Day with a note from Neil Druckmann on the studio website. Two new The Last of Us projects are confirmed in it, at a stage the studio itself calls very early. The same text pushes the full reveal of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet into 2027, two years after the sci-fi game first appeared. The studio also used its charity stream to raise money for AbleGamers. Whether those two projects are games at all remains unstated, which leaves the door open to a series, a comic or something else entirely.
At a glance
Two The Last of Us projects are confirmed at a very early stage, with nothing said about their form.
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet gets its full reveal in 2027, and no further news before then.
The studio’s charity stream raised $11,000 for AbleGamers, with the total still climbing.
What Neil Druckmann announced for The Last of Us
The note went up on 28 September on the official Naughty Dog blog, closing the day the studio sets aside for the series every year. Druckmann writes that the team has “a couple of very exciting new projects in very early stages, so we can’t say much about them at this point”. The studio stops short of saying whether these are games, adaptations or something else entirely.
Several American outlets picked up one detail that matters here: both projects would extend the canon beyond Part I and Part II, meaning beyond the story of Ellie and Joel as it has been told so far. This is the first time the studio has publicly pointed past that pair of games since Part II shipped in 2020. Naughty Dog says nothing about timing, about characters, or about where these projects sit on the timeline of the series. The wording leaves the headcount open, along with the question of which team is on which project. Naughty Dog employs several hundred people and has run parallel productions before, on Uncharted and The Last of Us at the same time. Two The Last of Us productions running side by side imply a structure Naughty Dog has never described in public. The note establishes two things: both projects exist, and both are too young to show. That is a shift in itself for a studio that has spent five years pointing away from the series whenever the subject came up in interviews.
Intergalactic slips to 2027 with one piece of artwork
The second announcement concerns the project that had been front and centre until now. Druckmann writes: “In 2027, that changes. We’ll fully reveal Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and give you a proper look at Jordan’s wild sci-fi adventure”. The studio is therefore stating outright that nothing more will surface before the end of this year. A fresh piece of artwork came with the note, and that is the extent of what the studio is willing to share right now. Push Square summed the situation up in a headline about new artwork standing in for news until 2027.
The game was unveiled at The Game Awards in December 2024 with Jordan A. Mun as its lead, played by Tati Gabrielle. Troy Baker, who voices Joel in the series, recently described that character as a spiritual successor to Ellie. That comparison set expectations high for a studio whose reputation rests on how it writes people rather than how it builds worlds. Jordan has barely been seen since, beyond a single trailer and a handful of stills released over the course of two years, which explains why the studio felt the need to address it now. For a studio that has shipped nothing since Part II, the wait now stretches by another full year. In between, Naughty Dog delivered two remasters, Part I in 2022 and Part II in 2024, with no original production alongside them. Intergalactic remains the only unreleased game officially in development at the studio, and it has just lost its reveal window. Anyone hoping for gameplay footage this year will go without, since the note promises a proper look and places it squarely in 2027. That leaves a three-year gap between the reveal at The Game Awards and the moment the game gets properly explained, which is long even by the standards of a studio known for taking its time.
A charity stream that raised $11,000
The Last of Us Day was built around a charity broadcast running through Monday 28 September. In his note, Druckmann thanks everyone who donated to AbleGamers, a body that works on making games playable for people with disabilities. The counter stood at $11,000 when the post went live, and the studio notes that donations were still coming in. Naughty Dog runs this exercise every year on the same date without turning it into a marketing line. The studio supported the same organisation during previous editions of the event, and the figure sits in line with what those streams have raised before.
Naughty Dog normally uses this yearly date to show The Last of Us merchandise and artwork. This edition served mostly to set a calendar: two unnamed projects, an announced game that waits another year, and a television series whose third season is casting in the meantime, with John Goodman, Laura Bailey and Ian Alexander joining the cast. Laura Bailey and Ian Alexander played Abby and Lev in the game itself, so the show keeps drawing on the very performers who originally built those two roles. HBO therefore carries the series forward on screen while the studio works behind closed doors on whatever comes next. The Last of Us is entering a stretch where the studio talks a great deal about what is coming and shows very little of it. The next meaningful date lands in 2027, and it belongs to a game outside the series.
To see what’s landing over the next few weeks, the Hitbox release calendar lists every date with its official source.