Summary

After Collider’s Secret Level screening, Steve Weintraub moderated a Q&A with creators Tim Miller and Dave Wilson.

The animated anthology series Secret Level, created by Tim Miller and Dave Wilson, got renewed for a second season days after its latest episodes were released.

In this conversation, the creators discuss the long road to Prime Video, working with names like Keanu Reeves, the animation process, and envision potential new seasons, additional special episodes, and exploring classic consoles like Atari and ColecoVision in the future.

Days after the second batch of Secret Level episodes dropped on Prime Video, creator Tim Miller and executive producer and supervising director Dave Wilson’s animated anthology series was renewed for a second season. Considering it’s tricky business to keep shows afloat in these streaming waters, in addition to Secret Level being a somewhat niche show, this was no easy feat. It’s especially rewarding for the over 2,000 animators who poured their love into this passion project over the years.
Like Miller’s acclaimed Netflix series, Love, Death & Robots, Secret Level takes two of his great loves — animation and video games — and combines them with original storytelling and a lot of star power. To bring beloved games like Warhammer 40,000, Pac-Man, Mega Man, and Armored Core to new life, they got enthusiastic help from celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Hart, Temuera Morrison, and Ariana Greenblatt.
To navigate these streaming seas, Miller and Wilson guide this massive ship with their hearts. Following a Collider screening for the second drop of episodes, the duo sat down with our own Steve Weintraub for an extended Q&A, and from the way they talk about Secret Level, it’s clear they’re reverential of the material. From the beginning of the process, Miller knew it would be a challenge to get the game IPs they were after. “It takes a lot of trust,” he acknowledges, discussing not only the faith the game companies had in them but the trust it took from Prime Video to greenlight the show. Check out the full conversation in the video above or the transcript below for the years of work put into Secret Level, how they got Reeves and other big names, which games weren’t on board (and which ones changed their mind post-Season 1), and their plans for Season 2 and beyond.
How ‘Love, Death & Robots’ Helped Shape ‘Secret Level’

“This seemed like the spiritual successor to that.”

COLLIDER: Huge thank you to you guys for the years of work to get this thing on screen. I actually want to jump backwards and talk a little bit about how you got this thing get off the ground?
TIM MILLER: Well, Blur’s been around for 30 years. What we mostly do is game cinematics. That’s kind of what we’re known for. Dave joined in 2002 and made some of the best game cinematics, like the Star Wars cinematics and Mass Effect and Halo. Fuck, there’s just too many to count. A lot. And and Warhammer 40,000 what. We did Love, Death & Robots, and this seemed like the spiritual successor to that to play to our strengths.
How many years ago did you actually get started on this?
DAVE WILSON: In 2021.
So 2021, you guys come up with the idea. When did it get greenlit? How long did it actually take to getting this thing on screen?
MILLER: It was a weird thing where we had the idea and, of course, we talked to the obvious people like Netflix, and it was a legal fucking quagmire of IP entanglements and the lawyering was more of an achievement almost than the graphics. So, Netflix didn’t want to do it for that reason, and Amazon said, “Yeah, we’ll fucking do it.” So, here we are. It was a strange thing that they believed that we could do it. I love my company, but I think that we were kind of the perfect people to do it because we could point to Love, Death & Robots, and it takes a lot of trust for the IP holder, the game companies to say, “Yeah, we’ll let you take our prized possessions and run around in the street with them.” It takes a lot of trust, and we had earned that trust because we’ve been in the industry for a while.
For the building of the infrastructure to make this first season, how much did you rely on the infrastructure you had figured out for Love, Death & Robots as a way to bring Secret Level to life?
WILSON: We just reinvented every time. You think we’d figure it out, but we don’t. It is a lot of the same studios we work with who are the same studios that we’ve sort of competed with for 20 years for all that game cinematic work, Digic in in Budapest, Unit in Paris, Platige in Poland, Illusorium in Spain, Access in the UK, Goodbye Kansas in Sweden. A lot of those are the partners that worked with us on Love, Death & Robots, some new. But I would say the biggest difference is, obviously, there’s the added complexity of the games themselves. But other than that, the pipeline that we’ve developed on Love, Death & Robots is pretty much the same thing.

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So that was her edge…

The first season is 15 episodes. How did that number get figured out?
WILSON: It was actually 18 at one point.
MILLER: It was supposed to have 18.
Will we get to see them in Season 2?

Did you always know it would be a split release or was it originally going to drop 18 at once?
MILLER: You know what? I’ve wanted a split release on this show since I was talking to this guy from Collider, who told me, “Tim, the data seems to indicate that a split release leads to more viewing and lets word of mouth build.” I can’t remember who that guy was.
WILSON: Yes. It was always a split plan. We actually wanted to release it in three drops, but it sort of worked out better this way.
MILLER: Steve — I’m just going to say it now because they already said, no, they won’t do it — gave me this other great fucking idea, which was to do Love, Death & IP for Netflix, to basically go and say, “Give us all your failed IP or your super popular stuff.” There were some, like Mark Miller’s thing, that just didn’t take off, but it’s a great comic. Or Cowboy Bebop or all these other shows. Steve’s like, “Go raid their IP library. Do new episodes in that IP.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s fucking genius,” And they said no. That happens a lot. You go, “Hey, I had this great idea…” And they go, “Yeah, no.”
Was Prime Video that said, “Let’s do 15 episodes,” or was it you guys? You were given a budget to make the first season, and I obviously don’t know what it costs per episode, but did it work out so that 15 episodes was, “We can do that for the number we’re given?”
WILSON: Yeah, it was essentially that. It’s amazing; it all starts with, like Tim says, you go in a room, and you’re like, “Hey, I want to make this show with all these games, and I think we’re going to make 18 episodes. I think the first season of LDR was 18 episodes, and we can make it for this much money.” Then, three years later, we’re actually making it, and a lot has changed in those three years, so we had to figure out a way to make it work. So, we basically had to drop three of the episodes to figure out how to get the other 15 made.
I have a lot of Season 2 questions, but for now, I just want to know, the three that were almost made, are they being punted into Season 2?
MILLER: No. Some dropped organically. There were some that fell out because of undue lawyering or shit like that.
Which Video Games Turned Down ‘Secret Level’?

“Hollywood happens.”

Image via Prime Video

When you’re pitching the first season to all the video game IPs, what was it like? What was the ratio of people that said yes to no?
WILSON: How many people rejected us? [Laughs]
Did you go after certain things where they were like, “Get the hell out of this room?”
WILSON: It is tricky because it’s not like we’re the first folks to realize, “Hey, these video game IPs are awesome, and we should turn them into other things.” So, a lot of them have preexisting deals, and that’s the beauty of the series. Prime Video essentially just puts the episode on the platform. Everything else, the characters we come up with, the storylines we develop, they belong to the developers. So, there was no land grab for the series, which I think is incredibly forward-thinking for Amazon.
Because it’s so new, a lot of the development executives who have these existing deals set up at Netflix or somewhere else, the natural inclination is, “This is going to get in the way of everything we’re doing.” There were some IPs that we approached that were having a real big moment at that time and Hollywood had come a calling, and three years later, nothing’s happened. We were going to make an episode for them, and it was going to be awesome, but Hollywood happens.
MILLER: I get a little chafed when I read online, and they’re like, “Hold on, these assholes took Spelunky when they could have taken Halo?” Or something like that. I’m like, “Man, you think that we didn’t talk to Halo or something?”
WILSON: It’s good to know 20 years in, you’re still reading the comments.
MILLER: I read a few. I consider it market research, Dave. But there are no black-and-white choices here. It’s not like we could just have anything we wanted, or they were all available. There are lots of different reasons. We did the best we could, and I love all the games that we have, and there are so many more games that we could have. That’s the trouble, too, is that we could make 10 seasons of this and still not run out of games that we like.
WILSON: The creative director at id [Software] is a good friend of ours, and so are folks at Microsoft, so we made a big plea because one of the things both Tim and I would love to do is do something that isn’t currently available in the games, like crossovers. We wanted to make a Master Chief/Doom Slayer crossover episode, and I spent a whole weekend crafting this impassioned letter of my childhood. And it’s exactly what Tim said; they were like, “Nah.”
MILLER: Of course, we begged for Half-Life… So, you can imagine.

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The fact that what you put on screen is so good and it’s already doing so well, I’d like to think that the other companies will be like, “Wait, this is actually pretty cool.”
MILLER: That’s because you think like a nerd, Steve. I have to say game companies have a much higher nerd component than, say, your average Hollywood studio, which is why we love doing games because, generally, you run into people who just fucking love their job. They’re there because this is what they want to do more than anything else. Certainly, there are people in the studios, but you do have a higher percentage of those in the game companies, which is why we love them.
That’s also why I’m saying that maybe in Season 2 or if you’re lucky enough to do Season 3, it will open doors to things that you couldn’t currently get.
MILLER: Yes, but even despite what I said, there are still a lot of lawyers. But we’re hopeful that it opens doors.
I was looking online, and one of the complaints, if you will, is that the episodes aren’t long enough. Talk a little bit about why the episodes are the runtime they are.
WILSON: We wanted them to be longer, too.
MILLER: Money, money, money. Money and I just want to do really great animation. You could lower the budget and do more time, but I don’t want to do shitty animation.
WILSON: Our five-minute episodes are reserved for indie nostalgia titles — so, Mega Man, Spelunky, Pac-Man, Sifu. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sitting at the end of the Mega Man episode, ready to go, and I’m probably like everybody else; I hang my head because I want to see where he’s going next. But we’ll say it’s not our franchise, but the love we get from Capcom about the process and how much they love their episode — I wouldn’t care if no one else [did]. They are so proud of it. A lot of the fans in our team who grew up playing the game also love it when that music kicks in. Rob Cairns, our composer who does almost all the episodes, is incredible, but when that music comes in at the end, yes, I wish it would keep going, too.
Will Any Season 1 Episodes Continue In Season 2?

Image via Prime Video

Now that Season 2 has been announced, is there any chance of continuing one of the Season 1 episodes, or do you envision it being all new games?
MILLER: There’s a chance.
WILSON: You’re saying that like you actually know, and they believe you! We don’t know that yet.
MILLER: I do know. I do know that, Dave, so don’t play coy. But we wouldn’t say it because that would be no fun. I’m just saying there’s a chance. I didn’t say it was happening. There’s a chance we get struck by lightning when we’re walking outside, too.
Did any of the people that you reached out to for Season 1 who turned you down call and say, “Actually, maybe we want to do this?”
MILLER: No, but I did get an interesting call from the Borderlands folks, which really made me pleased. [Laughs] Now you can do Borderlands the way it should be done!
How Keven Hart’s Daughter Got Involved With ‘Secret Level’

“Serendipity.”

Image via Prime Video

I could be wrong, but was that Kevin Hart? The voice?
MILLER: Yes, it was.
Did you announce that Kevin Hart’s in it?
WILSON: Yeah, he’s in the trailers and everything.
MILLER: And that’s his daughter, Heaven Hart, who came to the Borderlands set one day and I met her and she goes, “Oh, yeah. Deadpool. Cool.” And I said, “Well have you watched our other show Love, Death + Robots?” She went, “That’s your show? Love, Death & Robots is my favorite show.” And she knew every fucking episode. Then she asked if she could intern. She wants to be a writer. And she just so happened to look exactly like Dave’s concept art for the Playtime episode. So, I said, “Hey, you ever done any acting?” And she said, “A little.” And there it was. Serendipity.
Dave, how did you decide which episodes you wanted to direct?
WILSON: When I came on, the very first thing I wanted to do — I don’t know if everybody knows this, but the entire Unreal Tournament episode was done in Engine, which is something Tim and I have wanted to do for a very long time.
MILLER: Which is in the first drop.
WILSON: When I came on, I was like, “I want to do that episode.” And Tim was like, “Oh, shit. I already promised I’d give Frank,” who’s the creative director, “that episode.” So, I was pissed for about a week. But I’m greedy.
MILLER: Dave wanted to do all the episodes.
WILSON: Yeah, I’m greedy. I’m a big Warhammer fan. I’ve been painting the minifigs since I was a kid, so I knew I was going to do that. I’ve been begging for 20 years to do another… We did a Dawn of War trailer in 2004, and so since then, I’ve been wanting to do another Warhammer thing. And I picked Sifu; I’d just finished playing the game and I loved it, and I wanted to do that. Timing didn’t work out, so I couldn’t finish it.
Then, honestly, I wasn’t planning on doing the Armored Core episode, and it’s going to feel like I said, “I want to do that,” when Keanu [Reeves] said yes — it didn’t work that way. Peter Watts, who’s one of the authors, wrote this amazing short story that was bleak and dark. Peter wrote this book series called Blind Side, which is amazing if you haven’t read it. So, he wrote an amazing short story, and when I read that, I was like, “That’s the other one I want to do.” I love broken heroes, like Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker or Lisbeth Salander, and that sort of thing, and the pilots in Armored Core are these weird, broken characters. My favorite version of what Armored Core would be is like Mecha Top Gun meets Drive and Ryan Gosling. It’s just the perfect marriage.
MILLER: It’s more like Trainspotting.

Image via Prime Video

So, the first batch hits. I’m assuming you two, after working on this for so many years, went online just to see what people were saying. I looked, and people are pretty happy with that Warhammer episode. What does that mean to you?
MILLER: Dave and I only read the bad reviews.
WILSON: You do, and you read everything. You’ll scroll quickly through 200 of them, and then one negative one will pop up, and you will obsess over that. You walk around for weeks with it in your head.
MILLER: As the reviews started coming in, Dave would come down to breakfast when we were in Brazil, and he’d be like, “Ugh.” It just feels like you work so hard, and then you read these bad reviews — like the fucking Variety one where the woman says, “Now, I haven’t played a game since 1995, but my opinion is…” I’m like, “Fuck you.”
WILSON: 1990.
MILLER: I’m like, “Fuck you, you don’t get an opinion,” you know? This is not for you.
WILSON: She didn’t like Dune either.
MILLER: Or the IGN guy who shit on our series. Then in the comments they got, somebody said, “Fuck you. You didn’t like Penguin either, so you don’t get a vote.”
I’ve said this many times in many public settings, and I will say to you guys: Tim Miller is not someone who likes anything. So that the audience understands, what are the last few movies or TV shows you’ve loved?
MILLER: Dune.
Okay, and?
MILLER: And that’s it.
WILSON: Reach back to Gladiator.
MILLER: Oh, yes. Which means don’t go to Gladiator 2 if you feel the same way.
WILSON: We watched something, and I think the comment was, “That was the death of cinema.”
MILLER: But Sonic 3 is great.

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Yeah, actually, Sonic 3 is the best one they’ve done.
WILSON: To answer your question, though, it felt great about the Warhammer stuff. It’s very difficult when you love a franchise as much as that. The only thing you want less than not seeing more great adaptations of the material is to be responsible for a bad one. So, I was very nervous the day it came out, but it’s been good.
MILLER: Dave was nervous when he showed me the layout, the animatic version.
WILSON: I wonder why.
MILLER: So I watched the thing, and it’s long, and it’s in layout, right? So it doesn’t have all the beautiful stuff that you will see if you watched the first episode drop. I watched Dave’s thing, and I said, “I got nothing. It’s perfect. It’s a fucking masterpiece.” There are some of the best shots that Blur has ever done in Dave’s Warhammer piece.
WILSON: Thank you, Timothy.
The Warhammer is real good. Also, if I’m not mistaken, is Warhammer coming? Prime Video is developing it with Henry Cavill, right?
WILSON: That’s right.

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How Keanu Reeves Ended Up a “Junkie Mech Pilot”

“Do we have anything for piano?”

Image via Prime Video

Let’s talk about the Armored Core episode, which has Keanu Reeves. How did you guys get Keanu, and what did it actually mean when he agreed to do it? What is his involvement in terms of, like, is he coming to the studio? How long has he working on the episode? Can you take us behind the scenes and what it really means when someone like that signs on?
WILSON: Disbelief is the first thing. I was sitting at home, and Tim dictates into his telephone, and I get this text message.
MILLER: I have very fat fingers.
WILSON: So I get this message, “Do we have anything for piano?” And I’m like, “What does that mean?” And then I’m like, “Oh, Keanu’s there today.” We’d cast most of the episodes. There wasn’t actually a lot left. He was meeting Tim for another project, and all the artwork is up on the walls, and he was like, “What’s this?” There were only a handful left, and the one that we’d just actually got the story in for was Armored Core. So I texted back, “What about a junkie mech pilot?” And then didn’t hear anything for like an hour. And I was like, “Well, I guess not.” And then Tim texts back and is like, “He’s in!” And I’m like, “Bullshit, he’s not in.” And then the next thing is a video of Keanu Reeves just going… What did he say?
MILLER: I said, “Just say, ‘Junkie mech pilot,’” And he goes, “Junkie mech pilot. I’m in.”
WILSON: Yeah, and then I’ll tell this little story because you hear this all the time around town about how wonderful he is and how prepared and kind and generous he is. He lives up to all that hype. I thought, “At some point, the facade is going to fall, and the truth to never meet your heroes is going to come out.” So, two weeks before filming, we get this email, and it’s like, “Dave, Tim, I got some bad news. I’ve fractured my kneecap,” and, and, blah, blah, blah. I’m skimming to the bottom of the email where he’s going to tell me he can’t do it, and he’s like, “But I’ve learned all my lines. I’m off book. I can take the brace off, and I can shoot for five minutes at a time…” And I was like, “Oh my God, he’s still going to do it.” And so I’m like, “Don’t worry about it. Keep the brace on. We’ll give your character a limp and a brace.”
MILLER: Which was genius.
WILSON: And he shows up, and about two hours in, I can tell it’s hurting, man. It’s very recent, and his knee’s about the size of Tim’s head. About two hours in, he’s like, “Dave.” And I’m like, “Do you want to come back tomorrow?” He’s like, “Let’s just shoot it all now.” And I’m like, “What?” And he shot for 13 hours straight with that brace, and he doesn’t leave set. He just nips out, has a cigarette, comes back in, and he’s like, “Let’s go again!” Amazing, amazing human being. I mean, you should be so lucky in your career that someone will show up at the upper echelons of the town and just do it because they love doing it.

4:02

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I echo everything you said about Keanu. The way that you guys incorporate the brace of his character…
MILLER: It was super cool.
It’s fantastic.
WILSON: Also, he was sick. You could tell he had a cold, so a lot of the runny nose and cough and everything — all the same thing. It’s not acting. He shot through it all. It was great.
Over 2,000 People Worked on the Episodes of ‘Secret Level’ Across 20 Countries

Image via Prime Video

What do you think would surprise fans of the series to learn about the making of the series?
MILLER: 2,500 people were working on the show.
WILSON: Twenty countries and 2,500 artists, I would say from start to finish, for, from inception, four years. Takes a long time.
MILLER: I would also say that Keanu and Arnold [Schwarzenegger] and Kevin Hart and all these guys, normally, if you were doing a show like this, you’d want to maximize the celebrity value, but we don’t pay a lot of money. They love games, and they want to be in games, and they want to be part of the show because it looks cool, and they do it for the love of the show because they’re all super fucking rich. But for that, we don’t make them go and do shit like this. We do that shit, right? That feels like the gift that you give to a celebrity, which is you don’t have to be a celebrity. You can just act, do the thing that you love, and not have to deal with… Not that I don’t love this. I do, but you know what I mean. We didn’t ask him to go to Brazil, you know?
No, totally. Arnold’s episode is also fantastic.
WILSON: Those videos kept coming, by the way. The next week, two weeks later, there was one from Arnold Schwarzenegger working out. Same thing. “Dave, whatever you want me to do, I’m in.” And then the next week was another actor. And then, eventually, we were out of roles, and I had to tell Tim, “Could you please stop having your friend send me the tapes?”
MILLER: Yeah, which happened when I had breakfast with Ed Skrein, and I told him he didn’t get a role. So, he made a tape that said, “Dave, fuck you.”
WILSON: Actually, he didn’t say that. It was five minutes of, “I drove across town to have lunch with Tim, and you got nothing?”
MILLER: Yeah. “You got nothing. So, fuck you and your shitty show.”
Season 2.
MILLER: Yeah, Ed will be in another. He’s a great guy. He was Ajax in Deadpool, if you didn’t know. Because all these celebrities just coincidentally happened to be in projects that I worked on.
David Fincher Predicted ‘Secret Level’s Success

Image by Federico Napoli

When did you guys realize this was a pretty big hit for Prime Video?
WILSON: For me personally, Tim was going over to [David] Fincher’s house to talk about something to do with Love, Death & Robots, and he opens the door and the first words out of his mouth were, “So that Secret Level series of yours is going to be a hit, I hear.” And that was when I started to believe.
MILLER: But that was long before it came out. I mean, in answer to your question, truly, we got a call Friday that said, “Hey, it looks like the show’s going to do well,” from Amazon. That was when. Even then, though, they’re very cautious, like, “It’s trending positively.”
When it came out, it was number one on the platform above Red One.
MILLER: It’s a movie. That doesn’t count. Give us $250 million and we’ll show you.
WILSON: Or just $125.
MILLER: Yeah, just give us half.
For people that don’t realize, generally, with a streaming show, it’s a month in that they start figuring out whether or not they want to renew something.
WILSON: I think it’s longer than that.
MILLER: They contractually have three months to tell us if they’re going to do another season of Love, Death & Robots. So, you’re sitting around with a stick up your ass for three months waiting, like, “Are they going to give us another one?”
This is what I’m saying. It came out, and days later, they were like, “We don’t have to wait. This is big enough.”
MILLER: I’ve never experienced that until now. It’s awesome because Prime Video is awesome.
Tim Miller Has Plans for Future ‘Secret Level’

Image via Prime Video

With the development, had you been thinking about Season 2, hoping that it was going to happen? I think one of the problems with streaming is the long break between seasons.
WILSON: If you’re lucky enough that your show goes all the way up to release, and there’s just a three-month period, it’s not that bad. But most of them wrap a couple of months before, and your crew can’t just sit around and wait, so they will disband. It’s terrible because, especially on a show as complicated as this or on Love, Death & Robots, it’s not exactly plug-and-play. It is a very, very complicated show, especially when it comes to a crew that understands the intricacies of how all that animation works, the writing, and writers. Like J.T. Petty, our head writer — all the different hats he’s wearing every day and all the notes and rolling with all of that. When you get a renewal that quickly, it means everyone is still around. You can get the whole band back together because you don’t want to have to rebuild it every time. It’s heartbreaking.
MILLER: On the downside, Dave is very tired. There was, like, no break. This was right at the fucking finish line. We barely made it.
When did you actually finish the episodes?
WILSON: It was 14 weeks because Prime Video requires many months of ingest and localization. A couple of the episodes went right up, and when I say that, it’s just post. Color and sound.
I spoke to the Duffer Brothers for the last season of Stranger Things, and they told me that the day that the episodes were coming out, they were uploading final VFX shots and they’d populate into the Netflix system within 24 hours, so if you started bingeing the second it dropped, you would see, like, the 95% version of the VFX and the final VFX would be within 12 hours.
WILSON: That’s cool. You hear that, Prime Video? It’s like a live update.
MILLER: That happens in the movies, too. The tweaks on the final effects shots are coming, and so in North America, it’s fine, but in Slovakia…
WILSON: Have they replaced the Starbucks cup in Game of Thrones?
MILLER: They fixed that, yeah.

Image via HBO

You did 15 episodes in Season 1. With Season 2, is there an element in your brain where you’re like, “Let’s do eight episodes and get them on sooner?” So it can maintain every other year or whatever the hell the release date will be, or is it like we want to keep doing a similar amount and do what you did with Season 1?
WILSON: We have many ideas. Gaming as a sort of calendar has two big dates. It’s the summer, which is the same as Hollywood, too, but the way E3 used to be, and obviously now, at the end of the year, it would be great if we could have something for the summer, too. But honestly, we haven’t even fully wrapped our heads around this part. But it would be great.
MILLER: I would like this to be on a yearly cadence, even if that meant slightly fewer episodes.
WILSON: Or even just little specials, like you were asking if we were going to spin out and do more, like three-episode specials, three 15 or 20-minute episodes with their own little release at some other point in time, all under this “Secret Level Presents.”
MILLER: But we would like to get on a yearly cadence. It’s just that requires a lot of faith.
I’m just happy that they agreed to do a second season. I just think when it takes two years or three years, it loses momentum, and when it comes back, people are like, “What was that show again?”
WILSON: If we want it to become annual, we’d have to start a whole new team. It’s kind of incredible. I think there are, like, eight or 10 folks in LA just around the corner at our studio who run the entire series. It is unbelievable how much goes through a handful of people. If it takes another two years for this run, if we, after those two years, in the year three, want another one, we’d have to start that season next year.
MILLER: Just the way this works, about probably a third of the episodes are games that haven’t come out yet, like Exodus and things like that. That’s how shit like Concord happens. They have a release date, and we work towards that. We were actually finished with the episode when we found out what was happening.
WILSON: Many months.

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The game was removed from PlayStation’s stores two weeks after launch.

MILLER: So there was no way we weren’t going to release it, and it mystifies people.
WILSON: Despite all the requests to release it. “Just make another and drop it in!”
MILLER: Yeah, we couldn’t do that. The other thing that mystifies me is people go, “This seems like a blatant exercise in commerce.” And I’m like, “Well, fuck yeah, it is! So is moviemaking.” You go to buy a fucking ticket, and you buy fucking popcorn at the movies. It’s all commerce. We don’t get to make this unless they sell games. Sorry, but that’s the way it works. But I also don’t see anything wrong with that because I love games like I love movies. We have to pay people to make them.
WILSON: Just stop reading the comments, man.
Tim Miller and Dave Wilson Are Eyeing More Classic Consoles

Video games go back to the ‘70s and there are Atari, ColecoVision and Television. How much are you looking at those things?
WILSON: Yes. We’d love to get some of those. We were just talking about, like, if you’re playing something like Centipede, there’s what’s happening on the screen, and there’s what’s on the side of the cabinet, and on the side of a cabinet is an elf with a wand, but on the game, it’s just a pixel. I’m like, “What is that story about?” It’s fascinating. And Pong, I don’t know what that would be, but yes. When you take big Triple-A titles, it’s a little trickier because they’re still trying to find their feet, they have big narratives they’re trying to tell, so we have to sort of escape between the gates. But with those sorts of titles, yes, it’s exciting.
I also want to pitch Double Dragon. Those kinds of side-scrolling, fighting games.
MILLER: Flashback is my dream.
I could keep going. There are so many.
MILLER: Yeah, I know. There are so many. It’s crazy.
I’m curious with EA Sports or sports games, is that something that even interests you?
WILSON: One of our producers, Mike Rosemeyer, is a massive sports fan, and I think it is killing him that we don’t have a sports game in there yet. But I think it’s crazy not to because of how big of the gaming clubhouse sports games represent.
Just think about the popularity of the National Football League or those kinds of sports.
WILSON: I mean, FIFA dwarfs all of those, but yes.
MILLER: Some of the games feel like they’re too big. They don’t need us. Because, on some level, this is helping them, in theory, sell games. So they’re like, “Fuck you. We don’t need your show. We sell enough games without you.”
One of the things about animation is certain things cost more money. Can you pull the veil back on what costs more money when you’re making animated stuff? Is it a oner, is it when there are a lot of cuts? What costs the most when you’re doing animation, and how do you decide as producers and directors where and when to deploy the resources to spend that money to make that shot awesome?
WILSON: I remember when you asked [Robert] Kirkman that question for Invincible, and he was like, “Walking.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s not the same for us.” Dialogue is very difficult, especially with human characters, because of how critical we are. But there’s a shot in Warhammer where you’re trailing one of the stories in the canyon, and we’re on them for, like, a minute, and it’s just slaughter. So, you plant a flag as a director, and you go, “I want to do this.” And then you get a couple of them throughout the episode, and everyone bids it, and you realize what you’ve got left and how many other children you have to kick out of the house in order to pay for these ones. So, you decide what’s important to you. But those big oners are incredibly expensive, yes.
MILLER: I was pretty shocked at The Honor of Kings one by how much you got. Because changing environments would be one that is a pretty costly thing. And that whole environment’s constantly changing. It’s not like people walk into a room, you light it, and then they talk to each other for five minutes. It’s like every fucking shot the background is changing and the camera’s swirling and effects and animation and cloth is all super expensive.

Image via Prime Video

WILSON: There’s a moment in highend CG where you’ve got one character on screen and if you’ve got 1,000 characters on screen, it’s actually manageable. That’s a crowd system; this is a hero character. When you put like we did in Warhammer, like 10 or 20 high risk characters, all fully animated, facial, it gets very complicated very quickly. Even just the sort of hardware required to run those scenes is very complicated. But I think you always want some fear. You pitch a shot to your team, and you can see them going, like, “No fucking idea how we’re going to do that yet.” There are some shots that you always have in your head and you’re sort of waiting for the technology to catch up, and I think there’s some we’d like to deploy in Season 2.
MILLER: This is under the hood, but since you asked for animation, it would be impossible to do this show if we didn’t rigorously enforce a favored nations plan of attack, which means Honor of Kings doesn’t get more money per minute than Exodus gets per minute. Everybody is getting the same treatment. You may decide, “I’m going to put my efforts into character animation in this one, and I’m going to put it in visual effects in that one,” but they all get the same piggybank because nobody would sign up if we said, “Yeah, we’re going to take all the money and put it in Warhammer.” So, it’s a real kudos to our producers, some of whom are here, to solve that fucking jujitsu puzzle of money.
WILSON: So, this is why they don’t speak when they’re in a canyon in a dark cave in Warhammer.
Secret Level Season 1 is available to stream on Prime Video.

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Original stories set within the worlds of iconic video games are featured in this animated anthology series.

Cast

Keanu Reeves
, Parry Shen
, Ping Wu
, Lydia Look
, Nelson Lee
, Feodor Chin
, Rae Lim
, Erin Yvette
, Temuera Morrison
, Patrick Schwarzenegger
, Steve Blum
, Noah Manzoor
, Madeleine Knight
, Laura Wohlwend
, Delroy Atkinson
, Umulisa Gahiga
, Paul Ridley
, Rita Estevanovich
, Tracy Wiles
, Arnold Schwarzenegger
, Steven Pacey
, Gabriel Luna
, Arazou Baker

Creator(s)

Tim Miller

Production Company

Blur Studio, Amazon MGM Studios

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Watch on Prime