Secret Level is a new animated anthology series produced by Blur Studios and Amazon MGM Studios for Prime Video. Blur Studios, a long-standing animation production studio, recently had success with its last big original production, Love, Death, and Robots. Their goal is to make more adult animation in the Western market. This new series, Secret Level, is a collaboration with many Game Studios that are making new original animated shorts from classic and new video game franchises.
The list of game franchises these stories are inspired by are Armored Core, Concord, Crossfire, Dungeons & Dragons, Exodus, Honor of Kings, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, PAC-MAN, PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities), Sifu, Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Unreal Tournament, Warhammer 40,000. With such a diverse slate of games to pull from, the idea of this series is pretty interesting.
I had the opportunity to sit in on a press junket with executive producers Tim Miller and David Wilsonwho’s also the supervising director.
Here are some excerpts from what they said.
When asked about how they chose the franchises they used Tim Miller responded
“like Love, Death, and Robots, I think it’s really important to have something for everyone.
So, the structure of the show is it was important for us to have indie games, it was important for us to have nostalgia games, and then it was important for us to have the biggest triple A games.
And then we also knew it would be a big part of the show to have games that aren’t out yet. And so, it’s a mix of those, and it’s a mix of times from five to seven minutes to ten minutes to fifteen.”
Dave Wilson continued the answer
“Stylistically, we um in sort of some of the more triple A titles and all the ones that haven’t been released yet like Exodus, we wanted to stay close to what they’re already developing with the game. And some of the others like PAC-MAN or Spelunky, where there isn’t an established sort of cinematic style. We got some freedom to take some chances or develop a style with them. I would say that the majority of it is very high and like cinematic trailer work, sort of 70% of the episodes are that way.”
When asked about the opportunities and challenges in doing a series like this with such a diverse amount of games Dave Wilson answered
“I think the opportunity is almost obvious in that the beauty of the anthology is to be different. The danger is that they get homogenized. In Love, Death and Robots, the stories were curated from compendiums of short stories that Tim and the team picks. And we wanted to sort of rebuild that, so we bring a lot of the same authors back here – John Scalzi and Adrian Tchaikovsky. They come in and we distill the franchises down as quickly as we can and indoctrinate them into the world that the games. And then they pitch ideas to us and those winning pitches becomes a short story that becomes a screenplay and by doing so, we’re not homogenizing and it’s not Tim and Dave coming up with all these different stories.”
Tim Miller continued
“A lot of these authors work in the game industry, too, like Tamsyn Muir, who I love her novels, like Gideon the Ninth, she wrote this Spelunky episode and she worked in the game industry. And so when it was actually talking to her about another project and she said, I’m sorry, I’m missing my deadlines, but I can’t stop playing Spelunky. And I’m like, what is what is that? She then she told me about it and then I said, maybe we should put it in Secret Level. And she said, I’ll slit the throat of anyone who tries to get in the way of me writing that episode. So, you get a lot of passion from them.”
I then asked if they think that this series they’re creating is a means of bridging fans of animation who don’t play games and people who may play games that might not necessarily watch different types of animation, anthologies, or animations that aren’t t part of the game experience.
Dave Wilson answered:
“Um, I hope so. It’s funny because like when you say animation, like for me, gaming was the first form of like animation I like other than like child cartoons growing up. I feel like gaming brought adult animation to Western shores long before others in my opinion. But I hope that there’s like some people. We did focus groups and one of the answers who watched Warhammer was like, I didn’t even realize I was watching animation until I got to this questionnaire and it asked me if I liked animation or not. I think there’s a whole untapped adult realistic, cinematic animation explosion waiting to happen. With the sort of work where it’s Warhammer or Armored Core or like especially with you’re looking at a movie star, you know very well in a very different setting or playing a very different character than you’ve ever seen him before. So I’m hoping that, yes, it will.”
Tim Miller continued:
“I think anybody that likes games will like this. And it’ll feel like the game experience, an extension of the game experience and they love. I feel like anybody that loves animation and hopefully loves our Love, Death, and Robots show and will trust that even if they’re not game players that these guys know how to tell stories, so we’re gonna give it a shot. And then hopefully they’ll fall in love with a world of games too. “We hope their watching the show leads to game playing and gameplay leads to watching the show.”
