• Last week the first episode of The Last of Us series from HBO starting airing.
• The series features a deadly fungi similar to Cordyceps, which exists on Earth today.
• Now Google has created a little interactive easter egg for those who search for either The Last of Us or Cordyceps.

Last week the first episode of the The Last of Us series started airing in South Africa, with fans of the games able to watch via DStv or Showmax locally. As interest in the show grows, Google has created a little easter egg that our own Luis Monzon stumbled across earlier today.

If you search the terms The Last of Us or Cordyceps, you will be greeted by a mushroom symbol, which when clicked on, creates a fungi-esque pattern on the screen (seen in the header image).

The more you click on the button, the more fungi is created, before it slowly starts to fill the entire screen, in a not too dissimilar fashion to the virus seen in the games/series. This is also a reference to the sound that the zombies in the series make.

During the season opener, the idea of destructive fungi evolving and infecting human beings was posited, with it also serving as the basis for the Clickers we seen in The Last of Us. While this is science fiction for now, it is somewhat grounded in reality, as the aforementioned Cordyceps fungi exists in the real world.

It affects insects alone for now, and is seemingly not harmful to human beings. For a better idea of how it works, we highly recommend the BBC video embedded below.

As for The Last of Us series from HBO, despite only being two episodes deep, it is already garnering praise for sticking to the source material. With seven more episodes to go before the first season comes to an end, it will be interesting to see whether HBO has another winner on its hands.

Shifting back to the easter egg, it is quite cool, but by no means the best we have ever come across. That honour goes to the Thanos finger snap, which Google developed when Avengers: Infinity War released in cinemas. Snapping the mad titan’s fingers deleted half of your search results into dust.

Either way, it looks like The Last of Us is the latest piece of media to have entered into the zeitgeist.