‘Secret Level’ Reinvents Popular Video Game Franchises — Including a Dark and Violent Pac-Man

Video games are the new comic books. Now that Hollywood has finally cracked the code to not utterly ruining every video game property they get their hands on, we’re seeing more and more TV shows and movies take their cues from games — as hugely popular as “League of Legends,” as new as “Cyberpunk 2077,” with as much lore as “Fallout” or as little as “Werewolves Within.” Adaptations of video games are especially tricky because, unlike books or comics, games come with sound and fully realized character designs. 

This is why, when it came time to do not just one but 15 game adaptations in the adult animated anthology series “Secret Level,” creator Tim Miller took inspiration from his previous show, “Love Death + Robots,” and made familiarity with the source material a bonus rather than the basis. “I think the fact that you play the game and are very familiar with the lore should be the icing on the cake,” Miller told IndieWire.

Though some games, like “Pac-Man,” are light on story and lore, others, like “Dungeons & Dragons” and “Warhammer 40,000,” feature decades’ worth of lore across dozens of published stories, which can make the process of encapsulating the essence of a game into a single short challenging. “I think what you want to do is pick a particular aspect of the game and then find an emotional sort of underpinning for your story,” supervising director Dave Wilson explained. “There are very human stories that you don’t have to understand the franchises to connect to. Then it’s about finding a way to make it entertaining and fulfilling for the fans who have spent decades of their lives with those series.”

“Secret Level” is an animated anthology series based on 15 vastly different games, from “Armored Core” and “Sifu” to “Unreal Tournament” and “Mega Man.” Each episode takes a different approach, with each animation studio bringing a different art style. Some feel like side stories set within the franchise, like the “Dungeons & Dragons” episode telling a short fantasy adventure, while others radically reimagine their source material’s story and visuals — like “Pac-Man” going for a bleak, bloody sci-fi dystopia. It was a big goal for the series to allow the individual creators the freedom to reinterpret their assignments.

“The ‘Pac-Man’ episode obviously doesn’t have a lot of connection to the 8-bit game that we love, but it was all part of the vision of the directors of the episode,” Wilson said. “They read the script and came back with a pitch for how they wanted to adapt it to the screen, with their art style baked in from the jump, inspired by Pascal Blanchet with a little Mobius thrown in. It always starts with the directors, same with Emily Dean with the ‘Spelunky’ episode. She knew she wanted a sort of ‘Arcane’-inspired style for the story and ran with it. The directors often are the driving forces behind the look of their episodes, and they have the freedom to do that.”

When it comes to the scripts, “Secret Level” continues the process started in “Love Death + Robots” of having fiction writers pitch ideas based on the video games being adapted. Then, Miller and his team select a story idea, and the writer comes back with a short story that the episode’s final writer adapts into a screenplay by the episode’s final writer. “We give them a huge deck of lore about the game and the do’s and don’ts that we get from the studios,” Miller explained. “Some had strict guidelines, others gave us absolute free rein to do what we wanted.”

Even though “Secret Level” features a variety of games, from board games to classic arcade games to modern first-person shooters and beyond, the team considered hundreds of games during a challenging selection process. It starts, of course, with a list of Miller’s and his team’s favorites, “then we start talking to the game studios,” Miller said. “Some of them were willing to take this leap, because it is a new and different format than waiting for a feature to get made. Other studios said, ‘Well, maybe next year.’ The politics can be quite daunting.”

“We got most of the games that we wanted,” Wilson added. “There are ones that are still off in the wings. There are hundreds of games that we would like to do in this format.”

“Secret Level” premieres on December 10 with its first two episodes and releases two episodes weekly through the January 27 finale.