Prime Video is already off to a great start in adapting video games fall, and now secret level aims to continue building on this success. Unlike the current TV adaptations, the upcoming series from Blur Studios is an anthology: games of the past, present and future get individual episodes for themselves where they give the audience a brief glimpse into their world and what it’s all about.
Tackling multiple games in one show is a challenge, but Blur already has some experience. His animated anthology series Love, death and robots has been a hit on Netflix for three seasons, and the studio has spent decades creating cinematic (and sometimes only cinematic) trailers for big video games like Dark Souls II i Warframe. When it was time to pitch secret level at game studios, Blur’s resume and the relationships he built over the years basically spoke for themselves. Or as creator Tim Miller said during a recent interview with io9, “We’ve established a level of trust with most of these people and they trust that we won’t screw up their IP.”
“We’ve worked in video games for almost 30 years … we’ve made tons and tons of trailers. They know we’re going to be careful with it and represent it the way it’s represented,” Miller continued.
io9 recently spoke with Miller and secret levelSupervising producer Dave Wilson on the show and the duo consider their past work why this series exists in the first place. Miller may have hit on the initial idea, but both gave a lot of credit to the old CG trailers Blur worked on, which were often played at major game events. They used this work to create Netflix Love, death and robots, and once that were “warmly received” by critics and audiences, Miller and Wilson noted, so the studios (and Prime Video) achieved what they intended with their compilation of video game stories.
each one secret level The episode tries to capture as much of the essence of its source material as possible. According to Wilson, Blur would meet with each individual studio and create a guide of around 50-100 pages of information that would become the “creative kickoff” for each episode. More than Blur’s story, Wilson called these guides the “first step” in gaining the trust of developers. All studios are protective of how their games are streamed, especially those whose games aren’t out yet. (One episode puts the focus exodus a sci-fi RPG that was announced almost a full year ago at the 2023 Game Awards and still hasn’t been released.) For the games that are already out, these decks more than got the job done: According to Wilson, that of Obsidian science. end RPG The outer worlds was “such a faithful representation of what makes their intellectual property great,” since the studio used it to onboard new hires working on the next sequel.
Blur is full of people who play, Wilson continued, and enough of them have played many of the adaptations in the show. To avoid homogenizing him and Miller, he brought in several authors and writers to pitch ideas, many of whom also pitched Love, death and robots. The stories here range from stories that take place anywhere in the game world, to offering a cinematic version of the game in question or directly showing events within its wider universe.. (For the latter, see the much discussed concord episode.) An episode that breaks with this convention is the Pac-Man one A recent teaser shows a confused, cloaked figure traversing an alien world, which isn’t what most people would associate when they think of the sinking yellow ball, and if you think that’s weird, things only get more so peculiar from here on.
According to Wilson, the seeds for this concept were planted by Bandai Namco, who he said “threw down the gauntlet” and challenged Blur to do something different with Pac-Man. The character has been adapted for television several times since 1982, but those were more faithful and conventional stories than this show offers, and he and Miller know it won’t be for everyone. Miller thinks it will be 50/50 between love and hate, and said he “can’t wait” to see the comments and reactions from people online, while Wilson thinks that ratio will be lower. The episode may not be what anyone expects, or even what they it’s expected to do, but in Miller’s words, getting to do something so outlandish is “just the beauty of this creative process.”
secret level premieres Tuesday, December 10 on Prime Video. Expect our review soon.
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