New World: Aeternum, Amazon Games' MMO, is set during the Age of Exploration on an island where death is a mere inconvenience—but immortality isn't always a blessing. For some, eternal life leads to madness, while others lose their souls. Some bodies are long since hollowed out but continue to exist, unable to find peace. This concept quickly becomes dark, but the animated anthology series Secret Level takes a slightly different approach in its episode based on New World.
"New World: Aeternum is not as light as the episode portrays it," said Rob Chestney, New World: Aeternum's narrative director, during a Q&A session with press following a recent screening of Secret Level's first episode. "We describe it as grimdark, supernatural rather than fantasy." The video game's premise of player death is integrated into the fiction of New World: Aeternum, providing an in-universe reason for frequent death and resurrection. In the game's narrative, this is often treated seriously. However, the Secret Level episode injects dark humor into the concept of death and its consequences, resulting in a comedy rather than a dark fantasy. This interpretation of New World: Aeternum uses the same ideas but with a very different outcome than the game itself.
The New World episode serves as a good example of Blur Studios' process in creating Secret Level, which features episodes based on 15 different games from 11 different developers. The episode focuses on a key element of the game, drawing out something that resonates with viewers regardless of their familiarity with the world. However, it also means condensing an entire game world, which might take players tens of hours to explore, into a few characters and minutes of story.
"Especially with this episode, but with any game that is vast and has so much to draw from, especially with an uninitiated audience, you want to distill it down to something personal that people can connect to," said Dave Wilson, Secret Level's executive producer. "So, with everything available to us, that's why it got distilled down to a handful of characters that you can, in 10 minutes, actually feel something for. One of our mantras is that people remember what they felt, not what they saw."
The process of creating Secret Level episodes seemed intense. To distill a particular idea or aspect of a game, Blur Studios spent time with developers to immerse themselves in the games. As Secret Level creator and executive producer Tim Miller explained, Blur developed extensive documents, or "decks," about each game.
"We do a deep dive with the lore, with the game developers, we build a huge deck. These decks are massive, like 70 pages of dos and don'ts about the game, here's what's interesting," Miller said. "And of course, we ask the developers, what's interesting about the lore and the characters? What do you feel is territory worth exploring? And sometimes the answer is, let's just make something cool. Sometimes it is, predictably, 'Well, we have a game coming out that focuses on this,' and that's also cool."
Blur took all the material about the games and passed it onto writers, who then pitched story ideas—like the one about the funnier side of living forever. "Because there's so many writers, and because they come from such varied backgrounds and it's such a wide variety of POVs, we get a really wide variety of stories, much better than Dave and I sitting in a room, you know, whatever two white guys would come up with," he continued. "It's a much more interesting and broad spectrum of stories. I love that aspect. And we get a lot of unexpected things we would not have come up with."
New World: Aeternum is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. While viewers will have to wait until December to see Secret Level's take on Aeternum, the grimdark fantasy MMO is available for players to explore now. You can read more about the episode on the Amazon Games blog.
