Amazon’s ‘Secret Level’ Bosses Talk ‘Troubling’ ‘Pac-Man’ Concept and Why They Didn’t Scrap Episode Based on Canceled Game ‘Concord’

variety.com:

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer SPOILER WARNING: This story includes spoilers for Amazon Prime Video‘s “Secret Level.” Amazon’s new 15-episode adult-animated anthology series “Secret Level” features original stories set within the worlds of various video games.

These run the gamut from classic ’80s games to today’s complex tactical titles. But they’re each adapted in somewhat surprising ways, the best example of which is Episode 6, “Pac-Man: Circle.” In just over 10 minutes, the episode is a haunting retelling of the iconic arcade game, following a floating gold orb named Puck (voiced by “The Mandalorian” actor Emily Swallow) that presses on in influencing the Swordsman (Aleks Le) to kill and eat and kill and eat everything around them in an endless maze. “‘Pac-Man,’ on its philosophical basis, is a really disturbing game.

It’s eat or be eaten; it’s in the DNA,” “Secret Level” creator Tim Miller, the director of “Deadpool” and “Terminator: Dark Fate,” tells Variety. “I’d love to take sole credit for why the ‘Pac-Man’ episode is as troubling as it is, but we got on a call with Bandai early on, and the literal mission statement from them translated was: We would like audiences to wonder what the fuck we did to Pac-Man,” says Dave Wilson, series’ executive producer and supervising director. “So we then set about with our authors and screenwriters trying to come up with an idea that would do that justice.

We didn’t.” Wilson, who describes the final product as “‘Pac-Man’ by way of ‘Memento,'” says at first they were “sitting in a room trying to come up with ideas, and somebody said out loud, ‘You can eat them, but just never their eyes.'” “We got a lot of what you would expect ‘Pac-Man’ episodes to be,” Wilson says of the.