How Tim Miller Adapted 15 Video Games for Amazon’s ‘Secret Levels’ Series

If there’s one thing filmmaker Tim Miller knows how to do, it’s making cool-looking shit. As a director, he’s made action-heavy films like Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) and the first Deadpool (2016), a film that famously got made because of internet hype surrounding a leaked test reel (made by Miller). As an animator and VFX artist, he co-founded Blur Studio, which does everything from title sequences to David Fincher films to the cutscenes in video games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty.

But his biggest passion project has also been one of his most successful, Netflix’s sci-fi anthology series Love, Death & Robots, which has aired three seasons since 2019 and won him three Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Short Form Animated Program. Now, he’s set for a project that blends all his areas of expertise into one: Amazon’s Secret Level, another CG-animated short story collection, this time pulling its stories and aesthetics from different video game franchises rather than completely original works.

Unlike most recent adaptations that work to bring a single world to life, Secret Level uses the anthology format to translate a slew of different video games, adapted from a wide range of IP, including classics like Pac-Man and Mega Man, indies like Spelunky and Sifu, and modern hits like Armored Core and The Outer Worlds. It’s an ambitious undertaking that has at least some small appeal to gamers, with 15 episodes of varying length each introducing audiences to slice of life stories set within each gaming franchise. Viewers don’t need to know much about each prior to watching, but they’re all designed to hit home for dedicated fans.

Ahead of the series’ release on Dec. 10, Rolling Stone spoke with Miller about the creation of the show, from the initial pitches to the complicated dance of tones in the final product, as well as why there it was never an option to kill the episode based on Sony’s ill-fated live-service shooter, Concord.

Building the bible

For 30 years, Blur Studio’s work has been part of some of the biggest games in history, including Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011), and even this year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. So, when it came time for Miller to pitch his vision for the heavy metal-inspired Love, Death & Robots with friend and collaborator David Fincher, he already had all the materials needed to sell the idea.

“When I went to pitch Love, Death & Robots with Fincher, I essentially had an iPad and I said, ‘You see this? It’s cool, right? Give us some money and we’ll do more; we’ll do stuff that looks like this,’” he says.
“And they did. I used the video game trailers and backed in stories to sell Love, Death & Robots.”

After the success of the Netflix show, Miller had what he calls, “an epiphany moment.” Why not do the same thing that he was already doing — pitching short stories using the art of video games — but actually adapting them? Seems like a no-brainer, but Miller admits the idea came to him far slower than it should have.

The first step from there was reaching out to the many developers with whom Miller has been building relationships for decades. Most were receptive to some degree, although the level of control they wanted varied studio to studio. “There’s a mix between developers where some of them say, ‘Look we trust you, and we have to put all our energy into making the game,’” Miller says. “’So, just bring us in when you need us. Here are the basics, go with God.’ And then there’s others that say, ‘We want to manage every word, every comma, because the IP is very important to us.’”

After developers signed on to have their IP adapted, they began providing materials to Miller, often including digital assets, but more importantly each game’s “bible,” the giant overview that lays out everything that defines the game world. From there, Miller and the writers built out their own decks (“some of them are hundreds of pages”) that became the foundation for each episode’s tone and world building.

But the writers who begin the process aren’t necessarily the ones who finish it. “These are not screenwriters, they’re novelists and short story writers, many of whom we’ve with on Love, Death & Robots,” Miller explains. “We say, ‘Are you interested in this,’ [then] we ask them to pitch us story ideas. We pay them, and the winning idea gets turned into a prose version of the story, because they’re not screenwriters. Then we take that and adapt it into a screenplay.”

For the final screenplays, Miller says that there’s no one way to condense years’ worth of lore into a short story. “If you think of a game as a long-term event or happening, and you just focus on one part of it, or one character in it, [you] could do a slice of life, or you could do something that has a full arc,” he says. “It’s a very short arc, but an arc, nonetheless. Trying to focus on that, it really wasn’t hard to find interesting bits of lore and characters to push into stories.”

Miller also notes that, especially for older IP, there are huge story points that play a role in the larger narrative that fans would expect have been depicted on screen but haven’t. It’s in some of those gray areas where Secret Level can deliver an impactful piece of lore in a short amount time, that adds a layer to the games. But the biggest pitfall to dodge is trying to do too much.

“I think it’s always important to walk that line between too much information that people don’t care about and the information that helps the story along,” Miller says. “I feel like those rules apply to not just games, but to any story. Warhammer, for instance, has 100 books written about it. There’s no way you’re going to give everybody all that lore, and if you try, you’ll numb them.”

A celebration of games

When choosing to adapt not one or two, but 15 different games, there’s going to be a lot of disparate tones to balance. Where do you even begin? For Miller, it was about figuring out key elements from the games that the individual episodes would focus on. For some games, it was less about specific characters or plot beats to follow, and more about the vibe of world building remaining true to their franchise.

“I’d say if the IP is open to it, for whatever reason, we know that up front.,” Miller says. “Like, Exodus is a really big space opera, and eventually it becomes character focused. But really, the world is what they’re most interested in. The canvas, versus the individual brush strokes. But others are less so. [For Unreal Tournament], we chose the character that we wanted to focus on, [then] we brought back all the OG Unreal Tournament people back to consult on exactly what that was and to look at the design.”

Miller and the team at Blur Studio have experience working on not just games themselves, but existing adaptations, with their VFX featured in the popular Sonic the Hedgehog movies, there third of which arrives later this year. In many ways, Sonic is the perfect case study of what not to do when adapting a game. The movie’s initial trailer was infamously loathed by fans for its unsettling take on Sonic — a reaction so extreme that the filmmakers ended up redesigning the character from scratch to better resemble the games.

Miller has strong feelings about the respecting the source material. “I feel this way about virtually anything I adapt, which is there’s a reason that people love these games or a story or a book or anything else you might adapt,” he says. “And I think the filmmaker ignores that at their peril. I don’t understand this sort of Hollywood think, and I’ve talked to writers sometimes and they’ll literally say it out loud [that they don’t like the source material]. And I’m like, ‘Well, why the fuck did you take the job? Why would you adapt the book if you don’t really like the book?’

But it’s not always so easy. Miller admits that even in his past work, he hasn’t always hit the mark. But it’s not for a lack of trying: “You’d think, as a nerd, I’m going to understand what all the other nerds want. That’s not always the case, but that’s the intention.”

Miller says that the primary goal of the series isn’t to focus on any one genre or era, but to be a celebration of all of gaming, and not just video games. “Eventually, I would love for that to include Monopoly or board games, but Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons are kind of represented, even though they have video games, he says. “But we wanted it to have nostalgia and indie games, even though you might be tempted to say, ‘Let’s keep it current.’”

Two of those nostalgia-heavy games are Pac-Man and Mega Man, which, alongside the cartoony Indiana Jones-like vibe of indie game Spelunky, make for lighthearted, family friendly viewing. But in an anthology series, it’s important to remember that the tonal whiplash of cutesy kiddie content is being followed up immediately with something as gruesomely violent as Warhammer. But even for adults, there’s a fine line to ride between different tones that has to be adhered to in order to avoid detracting from the impact of any one episode in relation to another.

“Oddly enough, it doesn’t quite work the way you think it would, because people don’t have enough time to transition,” he says.” There’s a torture sequence in Deadpool, and then there’s a bar scene right after, which has some of the funniest jokes in the movie. And we noticed that people weren’t laughing at the jokes. So, for the torture scene, we put [the song] “Mr. Sandman,” that’s kind of lighthearted funny music. Even though it was a torture scene, it didn’t feel that heavy. Then, suddenly people are laughing in the bar scene.”

Miller says that special consideration had to be taken in the curation of the anthology drops, to avoid “scarring” kids. The first batch of episodes to arrive will be the more mature-leaning ones, while the ones more suitable for kids come after.

The Concord Dilemma

As part of the overall mission to incorporate games old and new, Secret Level initially announced that one of its episodes would revolve around a game that hadn’t even been released when the series was in development. That game is Concord, the live-service multiplayer shooter that Sony launched for PlayStation and PC, before abruptly pulling the plug just two weeks later.

After the recent closure of developers Firewalk Studios, Concord is officially dead. But there was no way for Miller to know what that eventual fate would be during the three years it took to produce Secret Level, nor had it ever been a consideration to remove the episode from the anthology.

Miller looks back fondly on working with Firewalk on the episode. “There was no nicer, more invested group of developers than the team on Concord,” he says. “I honestly don’t understand why it didn’t work. I know that they were trying to do the best they could, and they were a talented group of artists, so I feel terrible for that.”

It’s a sad truth, but its inclusion in Secret Level may be the last anyone ever sees of Concord, a send-off that Miller hopes is some consolation to its creators. “I don’t feel bad that it’s a part of the show, because I think it’s an episode that turned out really well, and you can kind of see the potential of this world and the characters,” he says. “If it’s the remaining vestige of that product, I hope the developers feel that it’s in some way worthy, just a little bit, of the blood, sweat, and tears they put into it.”

Miller notes the irony publishing the episode of a game that no longer exists but draws a comparison to other games in the series, like Mega Man or Unreal Tournament, which are essentially dead franchises themselves, with no future games on the horizon.

For Miller, there’s more to the celebration than just honoring great franchise. He hopes that his work on the series can lead to new opportunities across the media landscape. One way is inspiring developers to continue their work on dormant series, potentially even using the groundwork laid by the series in a technical capacity.

Miller explains that, to create the Unreal Tournament episode, he and the VFX team had to build an Unreal pipeline, basically creating the toolkit to produce footage or real-time renderings that look identical to the game, using the engine it’s built on. Unreal Engine is one of the most popular toolkits for designing CG effects, in both games and Hollywood movies, so Blur Studio showcasing what could be done for a modern Unreal franchise could, hopefully, pique interest in building off their work.

Of course, the most obvious outcome to be desired would be expanding individual episodes into their own spin-offs. After all, Secret Level is basically 15 backdoor pilots. “Look, I would never lie to you and say we didn’t have a thought about some of these [being] turned into movies or television series afterward,” Miller says. “You know, what better way to do that than to have an example that is five, 10, 15-minutes long to say, ‘Look how cool this could be.’”