One episode of television finds room for Kratos, a squad of Helldivers and a Colossus. That episode is “Playtime: Fulfillment,” the season 1 finale of Secret Level, and no other video game adaptation on TV is even attempting a swing that size.
Here’s the awkward part. When people credit Prime Video with finally cracking games-to-screen, Fallout is the show they name. But Amazon's more ambitious video game project isn’t Fallout. It’s the animated anthology parked a few rows further down the menu.
The curse everyone assumed would never lift
Think back to that strange artifact of a Bob Hoskins Mario movie, or the Dwayne Johnson Doom movie and its FPS-styled sequence. Game adaptations have been famously awful for decades, and there’s no mystery as to why. Games are immersive and rich. Filming one gives you, at best, a less visceral and exciting version of something you once controlled with your own hands.
Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider was loaded with over-the-shoulder stealth action. Watching somebody else sneak around simply isn’t as fun as doing the sneaking yourself.
Then came the last couple of years. Arcane brought the world of League of Legends to television as a dystopian saga about the underworld rising up against the ruling class. At HBO, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin leaned on cross-cutting and multi-perspective storytelling to broaden the characters of The Last of Us.
What Nolan and Joy actually managed
Fallout arrived in the thick of that run. Westworld duo Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy started from a set of extremely loose, malleable roleplaying games — the sort where story and character hinge entirely on the choices of the individual player — and forged them into a single cohesive, serialized drama.
That is tougher than it sounds, and the production bears it out. Costumers, set designers and visual effects artists rendered the games in live-action: barren wastelands, hideous mutant monstrosities, New Vegas, the Vaults. Much like Band of Brothers, it’s television that would survive being projected on a big screen.
Still, it operates inside a single world. A single mythology. That’s the ceiling.
Fifteen shorts, fifteen fandoms, zero safety net
Because Secret Level is animated, the convenient counterargument is that Fallout takes it automatically for doing outlandish things in live-action. Animation, after all, is more or less the medium those games used for their own cutscenes.
The convenient counterargument doesn’t hold. Fallout adapts Fallout. Secret Level tackles multiple beloved I.P.s, every one of them carrying a devoted fan base and a complicated mythos, and hands each story only a handful of minutes.
The first season is made up of 15 standalone shorts pulled from a wide smattering of games and franchises. Pac-Man. Mega Man. Dungeons & Dragons. A mishmash of PlayStation titles.
Tim Miller created it on his own, having broken through directing the first Deadpool before co-spearheading Netflix's animated anthology Love, Death & Robots alongside David Fincher. The distinction between those two anthologies counts: Love, Death & Robots told original stories, whereas Secret Level plays in sandboxes other people built.
The voice cast reads like a bit
Miller stacked it. Arnold Schwarzenegger alongside his son Patrick Schwarzenegger. Kevin Hart alongside his daughter Heaven Hart. Laura Bailey, royalty in the world of video game voice acting. Keanu Reeves, Gabriel Luna, Ariana Greenblatt, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and The Boys actor Claudia Doumit.
In a streaming landscape where nothing is allowed to feel safe, Secret Level picked up a season 2 renewal roughly two weeks after season 1 landed on Prime. A spinoff built out of the Warhammer 40,000 episode is also in development.
Fallout is an impressive series with cinematic scale and a dazzling sense of spectacle. Secret Level is the more impressive one — and it pulls it off three minutes at a time.