SPOILER WARNING: This story contains spoilers for Amazon Prime Video‘s “Secret Stage.”
Amazon’s new 15-episode adult-animated anthology sequence “Secret Stage” options unique tales set inside the worlds of varied video video games. These run the gamut from basic ’80s video games to as we speak’s complicated tactical titles.
However they’re every tailored in considerably shocking methods, the very best instance of which is Episode 6, “Pac-Man: Circle.” In simply over 10 minutes, the episode is a haunting retelling of the long-lasting arcade recreation, 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 all the pieces round them in an countless maze.
“‘Pac-Man,’ on its philosophical foundation, is a very disturbing recreation. It’s eat or be eaten; it’s within the DNA,” “Secret Stage” creator Tim Miller, the director of “Deadpool” and “Terminator: Darkish Destiny,” tells Selection.
“I’d like to take sole credit score for why the ‘Pac-Man’ episode is as troubling as it’s, however we obtained on a name with Bandai early on, and the literal mission assertion from them translated was: We wish audiences to marvel what the fuck we did to Pac-Man,” says Dave Wilson, sequence’ govt producer and supervising director. “So we then set about with our authors and screenwriters attempting to give you an thought that may do this justice. We didn’t.”
“Pac-Man: Circle” episode of Amazon’s “Secret Stage”
Courtesy of Prime
Wilson, who describes the ultimate product as “‘Pac-Man’ by the use of ‘Memento,’” says at first they had been “sitting in a room attempting to give you concepts, and anyone stated out loud, ‘You’ll be able to eat them, however simply by no means their eyes.’”
“We obtained lots of what you’ll anticipate ‘Pac-Man’ episodes to be,” Wilson says of the preliminary writers’-room pitches. It wasn’t till “Secret Stage” head author J.T. Petty (a author on survival online game “The Outlast Trials”) went away for the weekend and got here again with the almost-final script in hand that Wilson and Miller say that they had a narrative worthy of what Bandai requested of them.
“If there was an episode that form of was trustworthy from script to remaining pixel, it’s that one,” Wilson says. “I feel we obtained one be aware from Bandai, which was, there’s a UGSF on the again of the character’s cloak that they requested us so as to add. However apart from that, they allow us to do it precisely the best way you see it.”
“Secret Stage” boasts a formidable lineup of voice actors throughout its Season 1 episodes, together with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, Temuera Morrison, Ariana Greenblatt, Heaven Hart, Gabriel Luna, Ricky Whittle, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Merle Dandridge, Claudia Doumit, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Clive Standen, Laura Bailey and Michael Seaside.
However one of the notable inclusions within the present will not be an A-list solid member, however a recreation that was canceled and scrubbed from existence earlier than “Secret Stage” debuted: PlayStation’s “Harmony.” Shut down in September simply two weeks after it launched, the live-services recreation adopted a bunch of free-gunners in area. Whereas it had a small cult following, the title didn’t put up the numbers it wanted to outlive, and consequently, its developer, Firewalk Studios, was shuttered by Sony on the finish of October.
“My first thought once we heard it was not, ‘Oh, woe is us’ for our present — we actually felt dangerous for these folks, as a result of they’re associates and fellow artists and people who find themselves keen to take some dangers,” says Miller, who additionally created the Netflix animated anthology “Love, Dying + Robots.” “And we each know what it’s prefer to not have these dangers succeed, they usually’re actually good people who find themselves simply attempting to make a fantastic recreation.”
Although there was some hypothesis about whether or not the “Harmony” episode would in the end be included in “Secret Stage” — having already been introduced as one of many concerned IPs when Amazon revealed the anthology sequence — Miller says there was “no level at which we thought, ‘Let’s not put the episode within the present.’”
“Initially, we’ve got different episodes that don’t have current video games on the market, both as a result of they haven’t come out but, or as a result of they got here out previously and usually are not at present revealed,” Miller says. “So I didn’t really feel bizarre about that. But additionally, why? Tons of of artists and animators and lighters and modelers labored on this episode, and it’s nice. The characters are cool. It’s humorous. It’s a very fascinating episode. So why add insult to harm and never have all that arduous work be proven to the world? It’s a fantastic episode, no matter no matter occurred.”
The “Harmony” episode, “Harmony: Story of the Implacable,” tells the legendary story of the crew of the spaceship the Intrepid and the way they grew to become the primary free-gunners within the “Harmony” universe — a online game that was all a couple of completely different set of free-gunner characters, the crew of the spaceship the North Star.
Wilson says that whereas the story is the final remaining piece of recent content material based mostly on the online game IP, it’s a prequel that was not meant to have an effect on any future plans the sport studio had for “Harmony” on the time of growth.
“One of many precarious issues about creating an episode along with a recreation being created is that they’re nonetheless creating their characters and their lore,” Wilson says. “If we took their core characters and created a narrative with them, we might be locking them into these occasions and that lore.”
So it’s a Firewalk-approved storyline — however the episode leaves room to interpret it as a fantasy amongst free-gunners, or settle for it as canon.
“We wished to inform a narrative a couple of legendary free-gunner crew, a form of a ghost story that may have been informed to encourage different free-gunners. And due to that, we obtained lots of freedom in who our characters had been and what their tales had been,” Wilson says.
