In The Last of Us Remastered's commentary with director Neil Druckmann, he stated that him and the team initially didn't want to do an opening credits sequence. They changed their minds, partially because they felt that going from Sarah's death to a timeskip of twenty years later was too sudden. On top of that, the team found that when playtesters watched it in succession, they weren't paying attention when Tess and the rest of the game's world was introduced, because they were still focused on Sarah's death, so an opening sequence was needed to help bridge the gap between those events. The idea they came up with for the intro was time lapsed video footage of fungus growing, because the disease and outbreak in the game was based on a cordyceps fungus that spread through spores. The team contacted a group at Sony San Diego who made the whole opening sequence for them, making use of fungal kits to allow fungi to grow in their bathrooms, which took several days of filming to produce. The only use of computer animation in the opening sequence were the black spores seen throughout the intro.