Secret Level Preview
WHAT IS the SECRET LEVEL show?
If you don’t know what secret level is, we’ll explain, but we’re also gonna tell you three reasons why you should be excited for it and maybe a fourth bonus reason at the end.
Secret Level is a 15 part anthology series featuring shorts about some of the coolest games from the people who are behind the Netflix sci-fi animated anthology, Love, Death and Robots that will be landing exclusively on Prime Video December 10.
THREE REASONS TO BE EXCITED FOR the SECRET LEVEL show
PASSIONATE DEVELOPERS
One of the main people behind secret level and the person who made the emotional reveal at gamescom is Tim Miller, who has quite the decorated resume. Obviously, the biggest connection to gaming is that he co founded Blur in 1995. Since then they have worked on cinematics for some of the biggest names in gaming including Wolfenstein, Quake, grand theft auto, spider man, Batman, halo, Sonic, Star Wars, dark souls, call of duty and valorant just to name the higher profile ones.
Video game movies and shows are hit and miss, but are typically more miss. Who better to create such a show than a studio that has been entrenched in the industry for decades.
In addition to blur Miller also directed Deadpool in 2016, terminator in 2019 and is a director, writer and producer on the Netflix sci fi anthology series Love Death and Robots.
STRONG IP
The source material for Secret Level is unique to say the least. There are some inclusions like new world Aetrurnm, the MMO from Amazon, which makes sense considering that the series is an Amazon Prime exclusive. Then you have something like crossfire from tencent, which is not only massive in China, but is also published there by tencent, which likely helped with funding. It doesn’t hurt to have the largest potential audience for the show either.
Then Secret Level also covered other huge demographics including Warhammer, Mega-man, PacMan, Dungeons and Dragons, but then you have some interesting selections like Spelunky, Sifu and Unreal Tournament. At the end of the day, it seems like one of their main goals was to cast a wide net and have at least one thing for everyone just to get them in the door. There also looks to be strong involvement from PlayStation as it looks to include many PlayStation studios games like God of War and Ghost of Tsushima.
UNCHARTED TERRITORY
There hasn’t been anything like this for video games and the possibilities for additional seasons are endless if the show is able to find an audience. Not only is it a great way to expand the audience, but there is something special about experiencing our love of video games in a different medium.
We’ve seen movies before and tv shows, but there always seems to be a bigger corporate agenda, but secret level seems like it has the right intent. Be good first and profit will follow.
If we are going to assume that they will be similar length to Love Death and Robots episodes then they can range from about 6 minutes to 21. However the average episode is around 15-17 minutes.
BONUS REASON
Finally, it seemed like out of the 15 episodes, one was devoted to some PlayStation studios games. In the trailer we see the likes of Kratos and Jin, but Concord was also supposed to be one of the games featured. It will be very interesting to see what happens with this inclusion of Secret Level. Considering that the game was taken down only about two weeks after launch, a lot more can happen in a few months when it comes to deciding the future of the game. Only time will tell.