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Den of Geek was recently invited to watch an episode of Secret Level, Blur Studio and Amazon MGM Studios’ upcoming Prime Video anthology series featuring 15 self-contained episodes, each set in the world of a popular video game. Episodes include stories based on Mega Man, God of War, Sifu, Warhammer 40K, Armored Core, Dungeons & Dragons, Unreal Tournament, and The Outer Worlds. As you might have guessed, this is a very different approach to how video games have been adapted for television in the past.
The episode we were shown behind closed doors is set in New World: Aeternum’s titular island, where 17th-century explorers are shipwrecked and discover all of the world’s myths, heroes, and legends originate from this one, mysterious place. And, as was revealed at NYCC 2024, the episode stars none other than the Muscles From Brussels, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“‘What if Conan [the Barbarian] was all talk?’ That was the genesis for the episode,” Secret Level co-creator and executive producer Dave Wilson told Den of Geek at the screening. Indeed, the 10-minute episode is a subversion of the classic Schwarzenegger role, with the Muscles From Brussels playing a king and conqueror washing up on the beaches of Aeternum and getting humbled in a way fans of the game will find all too familiar.
“We were sat with a bunch of our writers in a room, and [co-creator] Tim Miller sent over a video of Arnold saying he wanted to be on the show!” Wilson says. “So we curated the episode for him.”
The world and lore of New World: Aeternum falls squarely into the grimdark fantasy subgenre (grimdark author Joe Abercrombie actually helped to polish up the episode’s script), and while the episode is quite grisly and grotesque in ways, the biggest takeaway was that it was funny as hell. It’s fun to see Schwarzenegger fully commit to poking fun at himself, and fans of the Governator are sure to have a blast with it. New World veterans will also recognize many of the environments and characters from the game, so the fan service here is two-fold.
If you’re not familiar with the characters and lore of New World: Aeternum, now is the perfect time to catch up as the game recently re-launched on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, allowing players from any platform to explore Aeternum and uncover its dark secrets alongside thousands of other adventurers. Those who land on Aeternum never die (a clever way of weaving respawns into the game’s fiction), and while this may seem like it might lower the story’s stakes, it does quite the opposite.
“Living forever isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” says New World: Aeternum narrative director Robert Chestney. “Your life isn’t on the line, but your soul is at stake.” This concept very much plays into the game’s Secret Level episode, in ways both touching and hilarious. “I fought very hard for New World to be the lead episode in the series because it’s so fucking funny,” says Secret Level‘s other co-creator, Blur Studio founder and Deadpool director Tim Miller. “Even if the episode is violent, the humor draws people in.”
Blur Studio has been making game and movie cinematics since the late ‘90s, alongside many of the other animation studios they eventually came to work on Secret Level with. While these studios have often vied for the same projects over the years, the show was an opportunity for them to collaborate and connect.
“The cool thing about the show in general is, these small boutiques that do game cinematics are usually our competitors, but over the course of Love, Death & Robots and Secret Level, they’ve become our friends,” Miller explains. “It’s personally satisfying to me to give all of these like-minded artists the kind of stuff I would love to work on. It’s a great creative process as an animation community.”
More than anything, Secret Level represents the gaming community coming together to celebrate the characters and worlds they love. The show was a monster of a production, with Blur collaborating with multiple studios at once to bring these titles to life in a way that honors the beloved characters and franchises.
“Just imagine the legal battles to figure it all out,” says Wilson of the scope of the production. “I grew up in South Africa, and I remember coming here, and E3 was this mecca of video games. Everybody came together to celebrate gaming. Now it’s this more disparate celebration, and it kind of bums me out. The fact that all of these studios came together—the fact that Mega Man is sitting alongside a Space Marine—is pretty amazing.”
The most unlikely aspect of this collaboration is that, on the business and trademark side, things were handled with the utmost respect and good faith. With so many recognizable characters represented on one show, it could have been a disaster deciding which company ultimately owns the content and assets. But Blur and Amazon decided early on in the process that they wanted to keep things simple and do what’s right by the studios that brought these games to life in the first place.
“Normally, everything is a land grab,” Miller explains. “The studio typically says, ‘If we spend money on your shit, we want to own your shit.’ Right from the get-go, we decided that any new ideas we come up with for the shows are not owned by Amazon—they belong to the IP holder. We’re building off of their material. Any new ideas, assets—it’s all theirs. It’s forward-thinking, I think. If every deal with each of the 15 studios was a rights option deal, we couldn’t have done it.”
Secret Level premieres on Prime Video on Dec. 10, and New World: Aeternum is available for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5 now.
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