SPOILER WARNING: This story includes spoilers for Amazon Prime Video‘s “Secret Level.”
Amazon’s new 15-episode adult-animated anthology series “Secret Level” features original stories set within the worlds of various video games. These run the gamut from classic ’80s games to today’s complex tactical titles.
But they’re each adapted in somewhat surprising ways, the best example of which is Episode 6, “Pac-Man: Circle.” In just over 10 minutes, the episode is a haunting retelling of the iconic arcade game, following a floating gold orb named Puck (voiced by “The Mandalorian” actor Emily Swallow) that presses on in influencing the Swordsman (Aleks Le) to kill and eat and kill and eat everything around them in an endless maze.
“‘Pac-Man,’ on its philosophical basis, is a really disturbing game. It’s eat or be eaten; it’s in the DNA,” “Secret Level” creator Tim Miller, the director of “Deadpool” and “Terminator: Dark Fate,” tells Variety.
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“I’d love to take sole credit for why the ‘Pac-Man’ episode is as troubling as it is, but we got on a call with Bandai early on, and the literal mission statement from them translated was: We would like audiences to wonder what the fuck we did to Pac-Man,” says Dave Wilson, series’ executive producer and supervising director. “So we then set about with our authors and screenwriters trying to come up with an idea that would do that justice. We didn’t.”
“Pac-Man: Circle” episode of Amazon’s “Secret Level”
Courtesy of Prime
Wilson, who describes the final product as “‘Pac-Man’ by way of ‘Memento,’” says at first they were “sitting in a room trying to come up with ideas, and somebody said out loud, ‘You can eat them, but just never their eyes.’”
“We got a lot of what you would expect ‘Pac-Man’ episodes to be,” Wilson says of the initial writers’-room pitches. It wasn’t until “Secret Level” head writer J.T. Petty (a writer on survival video game “The Outlast Trials”) went away for the weekend and came back with the almost-final script in hand that Wilson and Miller say they had a story worthy of what Bandai requested of them.
“If there was an episode that sort of was faithful from script to final pixel, it is that one,” Wilson says. “I think we got one note from Bandai, which was, there’s a UGSF on the back of the character’s cloak that they asked us to add. But other than that, they let us do it exactly the way you see it.”
“Secret Level” boasts an impressive lineup of voice actors across its Season 1 episodes, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, Temuera Morrison, Ariana Greenblatt, Heaven Hart, Gabriel Luna, Ricky Whittle, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Merle Dandridge, Claudia Doumit, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Clive Standen, Laura Bailey and Michael Beach.
But one of the most notable inclusions in the show is not an A-list cast member, but a game that was canceled and scrubbed from existence before “Secret Level” debuted: PlayStation’s “Concord.” Shut down in September just two weeks after it launched, the live-services game followed a group of free-gunners in space. While it had a small cult following, the title didn’t put up the numbers it needed to survive, and as a result, its developer, Firewalk Studios, was shuttered by Sony at the end of October.
“My first thought when we heard it was not, ‘Oh, woe is us’ for our show — we really felt bad for these people, because they’re friends and fellow artists and people who are willing to take some risks,” says Miller, who also created the Netflix animated anthology “Love, Death + Robots.” “And we both know what it’s like to not have those risks succeed, and they’re really good people who are just trying to make a great game.”
Though there was some speculation about whether the “Concord” episode would ultimately be included in “Secret Level” — having already been announced as one of the involved IPs when Amazon revealed the anthology series — Miller says there was “no point at which we thought, ‘Let’s not put the episode in the show.’”
“First of all, we have other episodes that don’t have existing games out there, either because they haven’t come out yet, or because they came out in the past and are not currently published,” Miller says. “So I didn’t feel weird about that. But also, why? Hundreds of artists and animators and lighters and modelers worked on this episode, and it’s great. The characters are cool. It’s funny. It’s a really interesting episode. So why add insult to injury and not have all that hard work be shown to the world? It’s a great episode, regardless of whatever happened.”
The “Concord” episode, “Concord: Tale of the Implacable,” tells the legendary story of the crew of the spaceship the Intrepid and how they became the first free-gunners in the “Concord” universe — a video game that was all about a different set of free-gunner characters, the crew of the spaceship the North Star.
Wilson says that while the story is the last remaining piece of new content based on the video game IP, it is a prequel that was not meant to affect any future plans the game studio had for “Concord” at the time of development.
“One of the precarious things about creating an episode in conjunction with a game being created is that they’re still developing their characters and their lore,” Wilson says. “If we took their core characters and created a story with them, we would be locking them into those events and that lore.”
So it’s a Firewalk-approved storyline — but the episode leaves room to interpret it as a myth among free-gunners, or accept it as canon.
“We wanted to tell a story about a legendary free-gunner crew, a sort of a ghost story that would have been told to inspire other free-gunners. And because of that, we got a lot of freedom in who our characters were and what their stories were,” Wilson says.