New The Last of Us patch removes controversial sex line numbers

Developer Naughty Dog recently made a blunder in its most recent game—The Last of Us—by accidentally including the number to a phone sex line in a random wall texture. The company has now released a patch for the game, numbered at 1.02, which brings some major improvements to the game’s stability in general and changes the phone number.

The phone number was on a random texture in an in-game bulletin board, and the developers had originally assumed that it would be an invalid number because of the digits ‘555’. However, using ‘800’ before it validated the number, and Kotaku verified it to be a sex line. This after a gamer called up the line in the hopes of getting to an easter egg and that’s something we know Naughty Dog has done in the past.

A very Naughty Dog (image credit: Kotaku)

When Kotaku contacted the game’s Creative Director Neil Druckmann about the phone number, he stated, “That was an artist’s mistake. What happened was, they put some phone numbers in the game and then they thought they could just change the area code to 555, then it’s invalid because it’s what they do in movies. But I guess that doesn’t work when you have a 1-800 in front of it. We’re now working to take it out,” Druckmann said. “It was just an honest mistake.”

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Changing the texture is the only change in the patch for single-player, with other changes being for the game’s multiplayer component. The patch brings about improvements to things like host migration, connectivity issues and intro camera for some introductory cutscenes.

Check out our review for The Last of Us.