One eagle-eyed The Last of Us 2 player recently found a small detail that they deemed makes the game's post-apocalyptic landscape even bleaker. The fan promptly took to social media to share their discovery of the tragicomic fact that the minimum wage in the series' universe remained at $7.25 per hour until the end of the world, according to an in-game poster that Ellie can stumble upon in The Last of Us 2.
Both The Last of Us games are packed with details to the point that this franchise is largely responsible for Naughty Dog's reputation as one of the most scrupulous developers in the world. The series fans are still discovering new The Last of Us Easter eggs to this day, though it's debatable whether this newly surfaced detail can be classified as such.
Federal minimum wage in the U.S. was last adjusted in July 2009, when it was raised to the $7.25 hourly rate that the newly discovered flyer is referencing. The outbreak that causes the fall of civilization in The Last of Us happens in 2013, so while this depressing TLoU Easter egg is definitely yet another example of Naughty Dog's attention to detail, it probably wasn't meant to be interpreted as social commentary, which is how Reddit user Strange_Music decided to frame their discovery. On the other hand, given how it's been almost a decade since the in-game outbreak and the real world still hasn't ended, nor has the minimum wage changed, this is yet another case of truth being stranger than fiction.
The U.S. Department of Labor has actually commissioned prints of a similar poster after the Congress last raised the minimum wage by amending the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). And while this in-game asset was ostensibly created from scratch, it seems to be loosely inspired by the real-life FLSA poster, though the design that ended up in The Last of Us 2 is black-and-white and actually features more content, including a toll-free, 555-prefixed number for a fake information service. For context, the actual FLSA flyer was designed in color and included some eye-grabbing red elements, as well as the agency's blue-dominated logo.
Like most creative works originating from the U.S. federal government, the minimum wage info poster that inspired the newly spotted flyer in The Last of Us 2 was released to the public domain. So, even though Naughty Dog could have used the copyright-free original, the studio's art team apparently decided to create a new asset from scratch, further underlining its detail-oriented approach to game development that the company is known for.
An inadvertent side effect of that punctilious design philosophy is that Naughty Dog has a fairly well-publicized crunch culture which TLoU2 even references in a bizarre piece of meta commentary that was discovered shortly following the hit game's 2020 release.
The Last of Us 2 is available now on PS4.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor