‘Secret Level' creator Tim Miller explains how he gets writers to create short stories based on video and role-playing games

Yahoo

16-05-2025

In putting together episodes of Secret Level, creator Tim Miller utilized a very similar system that he used when doing the show Love, Death + Robots. He assembled this group of novelists and short story writers and helped to give them key information about various video games to build stories off of. 'We make these big decks that tells you all the do's and don'ts and we send them to the authors and then they pitch us. We'll usually ask five or 10 authors to pitch us on any given game. Then we pick the best idea that we like and they write a prose version of that story which we then adapt into a screenplay,' he tells Gold Derby during our recent Meet the Experts: TV Animation panel.
Secret Level, which is available to stream on Prime Video, is an animated anthology series that tells standalone short stories based various video games and role-playing games. Among the games that were used as the basis for episodes in the first season were Dungeons & Dragons, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, Pac-Man, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Miller has won three Emmys in Best Short Form Animated Program for Love, Death + Robots in 2019, 2021, and 2022.
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Miller is a longtime lover of short stories and how flexible the format is in allowing one to tell different narratives. He gave an example of how this translated to television by remembering a pitch for a television series he made about lesbian necromancers in space and how the people in the meeting stopped him before he could get any further. However, to pitch something like that for Secret Level wouldn't cause anyone to bat an eye. 'That kind of freedom is impossible to get with the heavy lift of a movie or a series and you have to worry about it being popular to kids, grandmas, moms, dads, and everybody else. We can afford to be niche.'
When looking to what might serve as the basis for episodes in the second season, Miller doesn't divulge any specifics but does demonstrate that there are four categories of games they work with: nostalgia games, indie games, games that are coming out, and games that are currently out and popular. He especially loves the ones that fall into nostalgia because of the memories that they can they can bring back for him. 'Like Pac-Man was the first video game I ever played and so it has meaning to me. I still remember putting that quarter in the slot and so I love the fact that we can kind of go after anything in that regard and sort-of control the narrative and go after what we think is interesting instead of a commercial vibe.'
This article and video are presented by Prime Video.
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