The multi-award winning The Last of Us may not be the last of its kind, with hints of a sequel surfacing from an unusual source.

Michael Knowland might have slipped up in updating his public LinkedIn profile. Along with his current role as senior character artist at Avalanche Studios working on Just Cause 3 and his former positions at Naughty Dog as lead character artist on Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us, he also lists one month "prototyping head sculpts" on


The Last of Us 2.

The original game was widely acclaimed as one of the best written and most emotionally engaging games ever made. First released on PlayStation 3 in June 2013 and seeing an enhanced PS4 release a year later, it followed the relationship between broken and embittered Joel and his teenage charge Ellie, survivors in a post-apocalyptic America after an outbreak of mutated cordyceps fungus turned the infected into rampaging monsters.

In February this year, Creative Director Neil Druckmann gave an early glimmer that a sequel was in the works, stating in a Reddit AMA that "If you're asking about a sequel... right now I'd say it's 50/50." Naughty Dog's community strategist Arne Meyer added fuel to the fire in July, telling Videogamer.com that "I think it would be a disservice to ourselves and our fans if we didn't explore if we could continue the story." Knowland's CV is the first mention that actual development has begun on the game.

However, the original was a relatively self-contained story, with its spin-off DLC Left Behind covering one of the few areas unexplored in the main game. A return of Joel and Ellie would feel particularly hollow, though there is perhaps the potential for more stories set in the same world, with a new cast. Don't expect any concrete details to surface on The Last of Us 2 for a long while yet though. Naughty Dog's next game is Uncharted 4, announced at E3 for still-undated release in 2015, and the notoriously focussed studio will likely get that out of the door before getting into heavy development on any fungal follow-ups.