Call it a video game media renaissance in film and television because that‘s what it feels like with Prime Video’s Secret Level. Films, like the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, to shows, like Arcane, truly reinvigorated fans’ dreams and this show continues that. At its core, it looks like an anthology series that has self-contained stories within so many different worlds. Yet, with so many game studios and production teams jumping to the challenge, like with Star Wars: Visions and Black Mirror, it’s truly something special.
From the minds behind Love Death + Robots, this series contains different stories from a diverse range of video game franchises. Whether it be the mythological world of God of War to Warhammer‘s steampunk fantasy universe, this show brings something unique each episode. However, not much has been revealed about the development process that help Secret Level come to be. Luckily, at NYCC 2024, I got to sit down with creator Tim Miller and supervising director Dave Wilson to hear their insight into what’s in store!
Check out our roundtable discussion with Tim Miller and Dave Wilson about Secret Level down below!
How did you choose the first game for the first season of Secret Level?
WILSON: [It was] Warhammer.
MILLER: We did Warhammer in the past, and we’re friends with Games Workshop, that’s why. We made a big list and said we just went and talked to everybody, “Hey, we got this new game. It’s gonna be super cool, you wanna be a part of it?”
It seems like, “Oh, it’s so obvious now.” At the time, it wasn’t, and it took a lot of convincing, even from us who had been in the industry for a while, for people that this is gonna be a cool idea.
Diehard fans love Easter eggs in video games. Are there gonna be any hidden Easter eggs that have made their way from the video games into [Secret Level]?
WILSON: Yes, but if I told you, then it would ruin it, right?
It’s funny, because when we were making the series, when I was growing, I remember Doom 2 comes out, and my friend discovers John Romero’s head somewhere on his pike in that game. And it took me an entire week of trying to get through every corner to find it.
Unfortunately, nowadays, that there’s a secret or an Easter egg or something. It’s up on YouTube, like, that day. So no, I’m not going to tell you where they are all the way they are, but they are definitely many.
This enables you to go to different worlds and tell different stories. What was the first one that you wanted to express using [Secret Level]?
WILSON: So I’ll just use any episode that we picked, so Warhammer, for example. What we were just explaining is that, in Love Death + Robots, we essentially have short stories from compendiums. We wanted to continue that process that we bring authors in and they all pitch us ideas.
We sort of distill the entire franchise, all 40 years of Warhammer into a rather comprehensive guidebook. Together, with Games Workshop, we come up with do’s and don’t’s and go to those authors and they come back to us with some ideas. We sit through those, we pick a winner. It gets expanded out.
One of the things Tim and I didn’t wanna do was just homogenize the whole series through the whole Tim-Dave filter. That author pool was a way of making sure [we got] different voices and different walks of life. I would say no two episodes were created in the same way, which is what an anthology should be.
How familiar do people need to be with each of these video games to watch the show?
WILSON: Not at all. I think if the only people that showed up were gamers, the show would still be a massive success.
MILLER: Even then, not every gamer has played every game, right? There’s a disparity. The Warhammer fans, maybe they don’t play Spelunky. So how do you make it appealing to those [fans]?
I think the core is you have to stay true what fans fell in love with about the franchise, but you also have to have a core emotional story. Even in Warhammer, where it’s a lot of violence, there’s a father-son story. In Spelunky, it’s kind of a mother daughter story. They all have an emotional core, even if the age at which you watch them might be differently appropriate.
I honestly I don’t play half of those games because I’m too busy reading books, but I can appreciate all of them. And even like the Warhammer one, we sat down with someone down from a Hollywood studio and I said, “You’re not gonna understand any of this, and neither do I, honestly.” It is violent, but it is beautiful. And you can just have this experience.
WILSON: My hope is that the non fans are like, “Oh my god, I didn’t know anything.” You may have watched your partner play with the tabletop game and wonder, “Why is that interesting?” And hopefully the episode makes them lean in and go, “I would like to know more about that!”
HOLLYWOOD HANDLE: You’ve got so many video game properties here from Warhammer to Mega Man to Pac-Man. Are there any other video game properties that you wanted to include here, but you probably want to save for the future?
MILLER: Like, a billion! The list we had is pretty [long]. I wouldn’t look at this list and say, “This is the absolute top pick.” Dave’s list would be different than my list, would be different from your list, but the show is comprised of the people that we went after.
We have a giant Google Doc of all the games that we could put in the show, and it’s massive and you forget about all of them, and I’m like, “Oh my god, I lost six months of my life!”
There’s a lot of room left, I think we have many seasons if everybody shows up.
WILSON: I’m hoping that we can even have some sort of tabletop game. But I wanna know what the community wants to see. If there’s one day, we’ll have an audience-voted episode of what do people want to see. But, it is just us sitting in a room picking stuff and developers coming to us.
I’m curious what you think of as the essential criteria for a game to be considered for the show and what kind of games you would say never would be on Secret Level.
MILLER: There were some porn games. Probably not gonna explore that subcategory! Yeah, there were some.
WILSON: Anything new, there’s an inherent risk. We’ve never done this before. What is this gonna be like? I love the fact that all these sort of disparate franchises came together. This sounds like a great idea cause it feels more in service of the community than any of their individual IP, like, I miss E3!
I loved going and it felt like the community came together for this moment. And now, [Geoff Keighley] still has The Game Awards now. Whenever the game in community comes together, it just feels like this big entertainment clubhouse on planet Earth.
I think if anything, I just wouldn’t make everything all sci-fi. We would love horror, comedy, science fiction, fantasy. We try and get a little bit indie nostalgia, AAA games. We want as much variety as we can get.
Prime Video’s Secret Level begins streaming on December 10.
