How Amazon’s Secret Level Distills Your Favorite Games Into Short TV Show Episodes

New World: Aeternum, Amazon Games’ MMO, is set during the Age of Exploration, on an island where no one can die–but immortality isn’t always a gift. For some, living forever leads to madness, while others lose their souls. Some corpses are long since hollowed out but live on, unable to find peace.

That idea gets pretty dark pretty fast, but in the episode of animated anthology series Secret Level that’s based on New World, the focus is on a slightly different take on the material.

“[New World: Aeternum is] not quite as light as [the episode] presents it,” said New World: Aeternum narrative director Rob Chestney, during a question-and-answer session with press following a recent screening of Secret Level’s first episode. “We talk about it as grimdark. We talk about it as supernatural, rather than fantasy.”

The video game conceit of players dying is baked into the fiction of New World: Aeternum, giving an in-universe reason for players to die and resurrect frequently. In the game’s fiction, Chestney said, that often gets treated seriously. The Secret Level episode, however, puts a darkly humorous spin on all that death and how it alters consequences for characters, resulting in a short that’s a comedy, rather than a dark fantasy. It’s a take on New World: Aeternum that utilizes the same ideas but to a very different effect than the game itself.

The New World episode might be a good example of creator Blur Studios’ process in making Secret Level, which has episodes based on 15 different games from 11 different developers. The episode focuses on a key element of the game it’s based on, teasing out something that can resonate with viewers regardless of their familiarity with that world. But it also means shrinking down an entire game world that might take players tens of hours to experience, like New World, into something with a few characters and a few minutes of story.

“Especially with this episode, but any game that is that vast and there’s so much to draw from, especially with the sort of an unindoctrinated audience, you want to distill it down to something personal that people can connect to,” Secret Level executive producer Dave Wilson said. “So, with everything that was available to us, that’s why it got distilled down to a handful of characters that you could, in 10 minutes, you can actually feel something for. One of the mantras that we’ve attached to all this sort of storytelling is, people remember what they felt, not what they saw.”

The process for creating Secret Level episodes sounded pretty intense, though. To get that distillation of a particular idea or aspect of a game in the first place, Blur Studios, the animation studio behind the series, spent time with developers to immerse themselves in the games.

As Secret Level creator and executive producer Tim Miller explained, Blur developed massive documents, or “decks,” about each one.

“We do a really deep dive with the lore, with the game developers, we build a huge f**king deck. These decks are massive, you know? Like 70 pages of, like, dos and don’ts about the game, here’s what’s interesting,” Miller said. “And of course, we ask the developers, what’s interesting about the lore and the characters? What do you feel is territory worth exploring? And sometimes the answer is, let’s just make something cool. Sometimes it is, predictably, ‘Well, we have a game coming out that focuses on this,’ and that’s also cool.”

Blur took all the material about the games they created and passed them onto writers, Miller said, who then pitched story ideas–like the one about the funnier side of living forever.

“Because there’s so many [writers], and because they come from such varied backgrounds and it’s such a wide variety of POVs, we get a really wide variety of stories, much better than Dave and I sitting in a room, you know, whatever two white guys would come up with,” he continued. “It’s a much more interesting and broad spectrum of stories. I love that aspect. And we get a lot of unexpected things we would not have come up with.”

New World: Aeternum hit PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S this week, and is also available on PC, so while it’ll be a bit until viewers can see Secret Level’s take on Aeternum–the series releases in December–the grimdark fantasy MMO is available for players right now. You can read more about the episode on the Amazon Games blog.