Kratos, a squad of Helldivers and a Colossus all show up in the same episode of television. That’s the season 1 finale of Secret Level, an episode called “Playtime: Fulfillment,” and it’s the kind of swing no other video game adaptation on TV is even attempting.
Which brings us to the awkward part. Fallout is the show everyone points to when they talk about Prime Video finally cracking games-to-screen. But the more ambitious video game show on Amazon isn’t Fallout. It’s the animated anthology sitting a few rows down the menu.
The curse everybody assumed was permanent
Go back to the Bob Hoskins Mario movie, that weirdo artifact, or the Dwayne Johnson Doom movie with its FPS-styled sequence. Video game adaptations have been notoriously terrible for decades, and the reason isn’t mysterious. Games are rich and immersive. A filmed version is, at best, a less visceral and exciting take on something you used to control with your hands.
The Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider had plenty of over-the-shoulder stealth action. Watching someone else sneak just isn’t as fun as doing the sneaking.
Then the past couple of years happened. Arcane pulled the world of League of Legends onto television as a dystopian saga about the underworld revolting against the ruling class. Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin used cross-cutting and multi-perspective storytelling to widen the characters of The Last of Us at HBO.
What Nolan and Joy actually pulled off
And Fallout landed right in the middle of that run. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the Westworld duo, took a series of very loose, malleable roleplaying games, the kind where story and character depend entirely on what the individual player decides to do, and shaped them into one serialized, cohesive drama.
That’s harder than it sounds, and the production backs it up. Costumers, set designers and visual effects artists built the games in live-action: barren wastelands, hideous mutant monstrosities, New Vegas, the Vaults. Like Band of Brothers, it’s television that would hold up projected on a big screen.
But it lives inside one world. One mythology. That’s the ceiling.
Fifteen shorts, fifteen fandoms, no safety net
Secret Level is animated, so the easy argument is that Fallout wins by default for doing wild things in live-action. Animation is, after all, roughly the medium those games used for their own cutscenes.
The easy argument is wrong. Fallout is an adaptation of Fallout. Secret Level takes on multiple beloved I.P.s, each with a dedicated fan base and a complicated mythos, and gives each story only a few minutes to work.
Season 1 runs 15 standalone shorts drawn from a wide smattering of games and franchises. Pac-Man. Mega Man. Dungeons & Dragons. A mishmash of PlayStation titles.
Tim Miller created it solo, after breaking through as the director of the first Deadpool and then co-spearheading Netflix’s animated anthology Love, Death & Robots with David Fincher. The difference between the two anthologies matters: Love, Death & Robots told original stories, while Secret Level plays in sandboxes other people built.
The voice cast reads like a bit
Miller stacked it. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his son Patrick Schwarzenegger. Kevin Hart and his daughter Heaven Hart. Laura Bailey, who is video game voice acting royalty. Keanu Reeves, Gabriel Luna, Ariana Greenblatt, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Claudia Doumit from The Boys.
In a streaming era where nothing gets to feel safe, Secret Level got a season 2 renewal a couple of weeks after season 1 dropped on Prime. There’s also a spinoff in development built out of the Warhammer 40,000 episode.
Fallout is an impressive show with cinematic scale and a dazzling sense of spectacle. Secret Level is more impressive, and it does it three minutes at a time.
