Secret Level’s Creators on Getting Its Games Adaptation-Ready

Prime Video’s already gotten off to a great start at adapting video games with Fallout, and now Secret Level aims to further build on that success. Unlike current TV adaptations, Blur Studios’ upcoming series is an anthology: games of the past, present, and future get individual episodes to themselves where they give audiences a brief glimpse into their world and what they’re about.

Tackling multiple games in a single show is a challenge, but Blur already has some experience. Its animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots has been a hit over on Netflix for three seasons, and the studio’s spent decades creating cinematic trailers (and sometimes, just cinematics) for big video games like Dark Souls II and Warframe. When it came time to pitch Secret Level to game studios, Blur’s resume and the relationships it made over the years basically spoke for themselves. Or as creator Tim Miller put it 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 fuck their IP up.”

“We’ve worked in video games for almost 30 years…we’ve done tons and tons of trailers. They know we’re gonna be careful with it and represent it to be the way it to be represented,” Miller continued.

io9 recently spoke with Miller and Secret Level‘s supervising producer Dave Wilson about the show, and the duo consider its past work why this series exists in the first place. Miller may have hit upon the initial idea, but both gave a lot of credit to the old CG trailers Blur worked on, which often played at major game events. They used that work to create Netflix’s Love, Death, & Robots, and once that got a “warm reception” from critics and audiences, Miller and Wilson pointed to it so studios (and Prime Video) got what they were aiming for with their compilation of video game stories.

Prime Video

Each Secret Level episode tries to capture as much of their source material’s essence as they can. According to Wilson, Blur would meet with each individual studio and create a guide of about 50-100 page lore decks that became the “creative kickoff” for each episode. More than Blur’s history, Wilson called these guides the “first step” in earning developers’ trust. All studios are protective of how their games are conveyed, particularly the ones whose games haven’t even come out yet. (One episode puts the spotlight on Exodus, a sci-fi RPG that was announced almost a full year ago at the 2023 Game Awards, and has yet to release.) For the games already out, these decks more than did the job: according to Wilson, the one for Obsidian’s sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds was such a “faithful representation of what makes their IP great,” the studio’s since used it to onboard new hires working on the upcoming sequel.

Blur is filled with people who play games, continued Wilson, and enough of them have played a lot of the ones adapted in the show. To avoid homogenization from him and Miller, several authors and writers were brought in to pitch ideas, many of whom also pitched in for Love, Death, & Robots. The tales here range from stories set any point in the game’s world, to providing a cinematic version of playing the game in question, or directly showing events within its larger universe. (For the latter, see the much-discussed Concord episode.) One episode that breaks from that convention is the Pac-Man one. A recent teaser shows a confused, cloaked figure traversing an alien world, which is not what most people would associate with when they think of the ever-chomping yellow ball—and if you think that’s strange, things only get more peculiar from there.

According to Wilson, the seeds for that 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’s been adapted to TV multiple times since 1982, but those were more faithful, conventional stories than what this show’s offering, and he and Miller know it won’t be for everyone. Miller thinks it’ll be an even 50/50 split between love and hate, and said he “can’t wait” to see comments and reactions from people online, while Wilson thinks that ratio will be lower. The episode may not be what anyone’s expecting–or even what they expected to make–but in Miller’s words, getting to make something so strange 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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