Ethermac Exchange-'Secret Level' creators talk new video game Amazon series, that Pac

Spoiler alert! This story contains major details from the "Pac-Man" episode of Amazon Prime Video's "Secret Level."

For this team,Ethermac Exchange adapting a TV series from video games just made sense.

"Secret Level," streaming now on Amazon Prime Video, is an animated anthology series that takes inspiration from a handful of video games, including Mega Man, Pac-Man and Unreal Tournament. The series was created by Tim Miller (Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots" and 2016's "Deadpool") with executive producer Dave Wilson ("Love, Death & Robots" and "Bloodshot"), and features a star-studded cast, including Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emily Swallow and Kevin Hart.

"Blur, our studio, has been around almost 30 years now, and we've been involved with the games industry for almost all of those years, creating cinematics and trailers. So, it was an almost obvious pairing," Wilson told USA TODAY.

How the video games were adapted for 'Secret Level'

The team enjoyed exploring different options for how to tell stories based on the different video games.

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"I love the fact that we get to dabble in all these different types of storytelling from the art to the tone," Miller said. "We try and have a little something for everybody."

The episodes are adapted from newer titles and classic series, and they cover different game genres, such as sci-fi, fantasy and horror. The duo also looked to include different types of games, Miller said, such as adventure games, first-person shooters and 8-bit games.

'Secret Level':Video games featured, what to know about Prime Video anthology

The process behind developing each short episode from entire gaming worlds was complicated but concise, Wilson said.

"First, we sit with the developers, and we distill their 40-year or new franchise down into what we call a creative guide," Wilson said. "Which characters should we use? Where are the no-fly zones of the franchise that you don't want to adapt or you no longer consider part of your moving forward? Those creative guides are shared with the authors. They pitch us ideas from those ideas. We pick a winning pitch, it gets turned into a short story. That short story gets adapted into a screenplay."

The game companies they worked with are great resources because "they know their games in and out," Miller said.

Many of the companies have a person on staff called a Lore Master, which is "a great title of a great job just to know everything about the game," Miller said. "They give us some very clear ideas on what characters might be interesting to explore, what roads might be interesting to drive down. And that's where we start."

A different sort of Pac-Man — and a new game

The visual style, tone and themes for "Secret Level" episodes are varied like the games they're based on, but most hit familiar beats.

Then there's episode 6, "Pac-Man: Circle," a horror-tinged take on the colorful classic character. This terrifying and occasionally gory tale follows a warrior in an unfamiliar environment forced by a floating gold orb, Puck, to eat many enemies, thus becoming stronger.

Having such a different version of Pac-Man was "a simple mandate," from entertainment company and video game developer Bandai Namco, Wilson said. Bandai Namco develops, owns and publishes the Pac-Man franchise.

"I don't know if folks will watch that and think we went off the reservation, but their mandate was 'We would like people to wonder: what did they do to Pac-Man?'" Wilson said. "We tried multiple times to find a story that would embody that sentiment, and we failed until J.T. Petty, our head writer, went home one weekend and came back with the episode."

On Thursday, Bandai Namco announced "Shadow Labyrinth," a 2D action platformer that is also a darker take on Pac-Man.

Why 'Secret Level' creators didn't consider removing the Concord episode

One of the episodes of "Secret Level" is adapted from the video game Concord, a highly anticipated title that faced issues upon its release.

PlayStation shut down the online first-person shooter game in September, shortly after its debut on Aug. 23,with Sony offering full refunds to anyone who purchased the video game. The developer behind Concord, Firewalk Studios, was also closed down after the game was taken offline.

But the team behind "Secret Level" never considered removing or reworking the Concord episode. It was completed before the game's troubled launch.

"The worst thing we could do would be to remove the episode," Wilson said. "It would just be a hole in a series instead of a celebration of something thousands of people came together to make."

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"You've got to show some respect for people that put themselves out there," Miller said. "The (Concord) episode is really fun, and the characters are cool and it's really beautiful. It would be a real shame or insult to injury to not show the work of all the artists and animators that made that episode. They put a lot of hard work into it."

The Concord-based episode of "Secret Level" will be released Dec. 17 on Prime Video.

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