The University of Eastern Colorado was a nice place to go to school — at least before a mutant virus invaded campus 20 years ago and transformed its students and teachers into monstrous fungal freaks.
It’s also not a real college. Introduced nearly a decade ago in the PlayStation 3 video game The Last of Us, the fictional school was a backdrop assembled from generic, public-university imagery and northern Colorado scenery. It appeared to be based on Fort Collins, which hosts the real-life, 25,000-student Colorado State University, but was set in Boulder.
“The Last of Us” premiered as a TV series on HBO Max Jan. 15, and has gone on to win critical and audience love. On Sunday, Feb. 19, Episode 6 fleetingly showed us University of Eastern Colorado (“Home of the Big Horns,” according to one sign in the show) in an installment entitled “Kin.” The site, one of many in the grim road-trip drama, finds characters Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) navigating the area on horseback on their way from Wyoming to Utah.
It’s little surprise that Colorado’s Gov. Jared Polis tweeted about the “apparent similarities” to CSU on “The Last of Us,” given that he’s an avowed gamer himself.
While “The Last of Us” is the first major video-game-to-TV-series adaptation to win national acclaim, it’s just the latest in a long line of apocalyptic books, TV series, movies and video games based in Colorado. As The Denver Post reported in September 2020, it’s been a banner decade for video games that depict Colorado as a blood-soaked landscape of zombies, foreign military invasions and robot dinosaurs. That includes acclaimed, multimillion-dollar earners such as The Last of Us, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the Dead Rising series, Homefront, World War Z, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Wasteland 3.
It’s also just the latest TV show to be set in Colorado but not filmed here — look to Alberta, Canada, in this case (update: Southern Alberta Institute of Technology was used as the Eastern Colorado campus). It’s an example of out-of-state productions fumbling our geography and smudging other details for the sake of adaptation.
Some of this is due to copyright claims, as when the excellent Horizon: Zero Dawn video game depicted some of the state’s most iconic locations without directly naming them (see Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Empower Field at Mile High, NORAD, Maroon Bells, and the U.S. Air Force Academy), so as to avoid any legal complications.
To see a breakdown of why Colorado is a favorite locale for humanity’s downfall, read our in-depth report “Apocalypse Here.”
We’ve also rounded up and explored various TV shows and movies that have been set in Colorado, but filmed in other states and countries. Last year, we specifically ranked the TV shows set in Denver and Colorado (but filmed elsewhere), as well as the best and worst holiday and Christmas TV shows and movies based in Colorado.
Finally, here are a half-dozen actual Colorado sites you can visit that have been featured in movies such as “True Grit,” “Sleeper” and “Furious 7.” For more TV and film news and reviews, read more stories on The Know.
