A few blocks east of the Naughty Dog offices in Santa Monica is a small, side-of-the-road diner advertizing Japanese curry. It's a plastic-menus kind of place: a family joint on Saturday nights and a lunchtime hangout for employees of the neighboring strip mall the rest of the time. It's not where you'd expect to see a celebrity, do a business deal, or come up with a million-dollar idea. But it's where, in the summer of 2009, Naughty Dog game director Bruce Straley and creative lead Neil Druckmann conceived the idea The Last of Us.

