The Last of Us Accidentally Displays Real Phone Sex Numbers

In the post-apocalyptic United States of 2033 depicted in Naughty Dog and Sony’s hit PS3 title “The Last of Us,” many things have changed for the worse. Rest assured, though, that access to adult phone lines isn’t one of them.

As reported by CNBC and first brought to light by a Kotaku reader, a poster in the game features two 800-numbers that, when dialed in real life, actually connect to phone sex services. A contributor to NBC News’ technology blog even tested one of the numbers. You know, just to be sure.

So does that mean that in the future, “pest control” is a euphemism for the horizontal mambo? Not at all, according to Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, creative director on “The Last of Us.” As he explained to Kotaku, the artists were following the Hollywood convention of creating fictitious phone numbers with the area code 555, and were simply unaware that prefacing them with an 800 would turn them into valid numbers.

There’s no reason not to believe Naughty Dog on this one, even if the thought of it being intentional would have been amusing. Sony has also stated that an upcoming patch will fix the numbers, probably making “The Last of Us” the first video game in history that could list “removed working phone sex numbers” among its patch notes.