‘We would like audiences to wonder what the f**k they did with Pac-Man’: The creators of Secret Level say Bandai Namco encouraged them to do ‘whatever we want’ with the iconic dot-gobbler

Animated anthology series Secret Level arrives on Prime TV next week on December 10, featuring 15 episodes, each based on a different videogame. From the creator of Love, Death, and Robots, the new series will reveal two episodes a week, based on classics like Mega Man, Dungeons & Dragons, and Armored Core, as well as more recent games like New World and Sifu. There’s even an episode about Exodus, which hasn’t launched yet, and Concord, which has already been shut down.

In a chat this week with the creators of Secret Level, however, I really only wanted to ask about a single episode based on an iconic game character:

Pac-Man.

I’m not going to spoil anything about the Pac-Man episode of Secret Level, but I will say it’s probably about the last thing you’d ever expect from an animated feature about a yellow circle that gobbles dots and gets chased by ghosts. The episode is weird and gruesome and a huge departure from the game itself. Turns out, Bandai Namco was totally into that.

“They challenged us from the jump,” said Dave Wilson, Secret Level’s supervising director and executive producer. “We got on the call with the developers at Bandai, and the translated mission statement was: ‘We would like audiences to wonder what the fuck they did with Pac Man.’ And so we were like, no problem.”

Mission accomplished, I’d say. Again, no spoilers, but I definitely wound up wondering that exact thing while watching.

“They get script approval,” Wilson said when I asked how involved the studio was. “They saw everything.” Wilson thinks they only got a single note from Bandai Namco on the episode, about the placement of a logo. “Other than that, it was whatever we want to do.”

I asked if other studios were just as willing to let Secret Level go completely ham on their beloved characters and game worlds.

“I think it runs the gamut from folks that really want to closely manage the process to folks who say, ‘look, we trust you, just go with God,” creator and executive producer Tim Miller said. “But our company, Blur [Studio], has been doing this for almost 30 years now, and primarily in the game industry. So we have a lot of trust built up with folks that we’re going to handle their IP carefully, and we’re not going to go off and do terrible things to it.

“I don’t think the show would be possible without that [trust], because, honestly, many of them are busy making games,” Miller said. “They don’t have time to babysit us.”

Secret Level begins airing on December 10 on Prime TV.