Have you heard of Concord? Unless you listen to video game-focused podcasts (Triple Jump is a good one), probably not! But you should: Concord is one of the biggest financial disasters in entertainment history.
Sony’s hero shooter, which was in development for eight years and reportedly had a $400 million budget, was released on August 23, 2024. Less than two weeks later, Concord was taken offline and everyone who bought a copy (all 25,000 of you) was refunded. Just like that, Concord — which cost more than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to make — was gone.
Except in Secret Level. The Prime Video animated anthology series is set within the worlds of different video games, including Armored Core, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, and yes, Concord. It’s a rare instance of people being more familiar with the tie-in material than the original, since Secret Level had the biggest animated series debut in Prime Video history within its first week. Safe to say, it was a more successful debut than Concord.
Since Secret Level is doing so well, Prime Video quickly renewed it for season 2. Here’s what we know.
Plot
Secret Level tells original stories in existing video games (shout out to the Pac-Man and Mega Man episodes). There are no specific plot details about season 2 yet, but creator Tim Miller, who also oversaw Netflix’s Love, Death, & Robots, talked to Rolling Stone about the process of turning games into anthology episodes for the Blur Studio-produced series.
“If you think of a game as a long-term event or happening, and you just focus on one part of it, or one character in it, [you] could do a slice of life, or you could do something that has a full arc,” he explained. “It’s a very short arc, but an arc, nonetheless. Trying to focus on that, it really wasn’t hard to find interesting bits of lore and characters to push into stories.”
As you might imagine, there are plenty of video games that Miller and supervising director Dave Wilson wanted to adapt, but either the owners of the IP aren’t interested, or it would be a legal nightmare to do so.
“I get a little chafed when I read online,” Miller told Collider, “and they’re like, ‘Hold on, these assholes took Spelunky when they could have taken Halo?’ Or something like that. I’m like, man, you think that we didn’t talk to Halo or something?” Wilson even wrote an “impassioned letter of my childhood” to Microsoft and id Software about a crossover episode featuring Master Chief from Halo and Doom Slayer from Doom. What did he hear back? “Nah.” They also “begged” for a Half-Life episode. Alas…
Miller continued:
“But there are no black-and-white choices here. It’s not like we could just have anything we wanted, or they were all available. There are lots of different reasons. We did the best we could, and I love all the games that we have, and there are so many more games that we could have. That’s the trouble, too, is that we could make 10 seasons of this and still not run out of games that we like.”
Maybe by season 10, we’ll get a Kingdom Hearts episode.
Cast
The cast for season 2 of Secret Level hasn’t been announced, but the voice actors for season 1 included Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Laura Bailey, Gabriel Luna, Ariana Greenblatt, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Michael Beach, Emily Swallow, Claudia Doumit, Parry Shen, Nelson Lee, Élodie Yung, Clive Standen, Ricky Whittle, Brenock O’Connor, Erin Yvette, Temuera Morrison, and Derek Phillips.
Release Date
There’s no release date yet, but considering Secret Level season 2 was only officially renewed last month, it’s going to be awhile.
Trailer
You can check out the trailer for Secret Level season 1 below.