When the video game The Last of Us was released in 2013, it looked like a perfect candidate for a big-budget movie or TV adaptation. Naughty Dog, the developer behind the popular Uncharted series (which is also getting the movie treatment starring Tom Holland as the Indiana Jones-meets-Benjamin Franklin Gates adventurer Nathan Drake), dreamed up the pummeling tragic story of the game, which follows a grizzled smuggler as he escorts a young girl across a zombie-packed wasteland, with a number of cinematic reference points like Night of the Living Dead and Sin City in mind. The game, which earned rave reviews, even being declared a masterpiece, and sold over a million units in its first week, fit right in with other early ’10s zombie favorites like The Walking Dead and World War Z.

Though the game’s publisher Sony announced in 2014 that it had signed on to distribute a Last of Us movie produced by Evil Dead and Spider-Man filmmaker Sam Raimi, the project got caught up in development hell and never came out. Now, HBO is producing a Last of Us series from Chernobyl producer Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the game’s co-writer and co-director. Will this one actually come out? Yes, it looks like it actually will-barring a zombie apocalypse. Read ahead for everything we know about what will likely be one of the biggest genre shows of the next few years.

The Last of Us tells the story of Joel, a survivor of an apocalyptic event involving some deadly mutant fungi, and Ellie, a teenage girl who Joel agrees to smuggle out of a quarantine zone. The zombies-like creatures in the game are referred to as “The Infected” and the first game is set roughly 20 years after the collapse of civilization following the initial outbreak. In the game, you spend a lot of time avoiding and fighting your cannibalistic enemies with various, often makeshift, weapons, but, like with most ambitious zombie fare, there’s quite a lot about human frailty in there and plenty of ethical conundrums to face. The game itself was praised for its capacity for hope even in its dire scenario, subversions of tired tropes about women needing to be saved, and the story at-large-UK gamer magazine Edge called it “the most riveting, emotionally resonant story-driven epic” of the PlayStation 3 era. With so much charged material to work with, HBO’s adaptation should be able to turn the game’s bleakness into a powerful, unique take on a survival horror series.

HBO’s The Last of Us will be produced by Craig Mazin, the Emmy-winning writer behind the Chernobyl, and Neil Druckmann, one of the key creators behind the game and the co-president of Naughty Dog, the game developer behind The Last of Us. It’s rare to see the original developer of a game so closely involved in the writing of a Hollywood adaptation, but, from a creative standpoint, it sounds like Mazin and Druckmann hit it off.

“Neil Druckmann is without question the finest storyteller working in the video game medium, and The Last of Us is his magnum opus,” Mazin said in a statement when the project was initially announced. “Getting a chance to adapt this breathtaking work of art has been a dream of mine for years, and I’m so honoured to do it in partnership with Neil.”

Druckmann was equally complimentary of Mazin. “From the first time I sat down to talk with Craig I was equally blown away by his approach to narrative and his love and deep understanding of The Last of Us,” said Druckmann. “With Chernobyl, Craig and HBO created a tense, harrowing, emotional masterpiece. I couldn’t think of better partners to bring the story of The Last of Us to life as a television show.”

We’ll have to wait and see how closely the series follows the exact story beats laid out in the game. (As Game of Thrones fans know, adaptations can go all sorts of ways.) When the project was first announced, the Hollywood Reporter noted that the series “will cover the events of the original game, which was written by Druckmann, with the possibility of additional content based on the forthcoming game sequel.”