Pac-Man like you've never seen: Inside Secret Level's bloody, Black Mirror-esque reimagining (exclusive)

A lone, cloaked swordsman treks across an apocalyptic wasteland. By his side is Puck, a golden, floating orb and guide through this hellscape that’s filled with vicious, gargantuan mutants. “Eat,” Puck tells this nameless traveler, “or be eaten.”

The twist is that we’re talking about Pac-Man, the classic, typically kid-friendly arcade game. That shocking realization, however, is very much the point. The team behind Secret Level, Amazon’s animated anthology series in which each episode adapts a particular video game, had one rule from Pac-Man owners Bandai Namco: “We would like audiences to wonder, What the f--- did they do to Pac-Man?” Dave Wilson, supervising director and executive producer, recalls of their conversations with the gaming publisher. 

“When I pitch it to people, I go, ‘It's actually our bloodiest episode ever,’” series creator Tim Miller adds. “And they're like, ‘Oh my God, I can't wait.’”

As told to Entertainment Weekly by Wilson, Miller, and JT Petty (Secret Level’s teleplay writer of the Pac-Man episode and the show's general EP), the trio took their cues from their past project together, Love Death + Robots, a different collection of animated genre shorts for Netflix. They built massive pitch decks to act as their go-to encyclopedias for each video game and then tasked a group of writers, mostly novelists and short story scribes, to pitch ideas. “They could just be a page or a paragraph even,” Wilson says, “and from those we picked the winning ideas.” The best concepts were then written out in prose before screenwriters took over to craft teleplays. 

Pac-Man, in particular, proved challenging. “We got some typical [pitches] you’d expect of a Pac-Man thing,” Wilson explains. “We went through this round a couple of times and never found an idea. Then one weekend — I’m oversimplifying it — JT went away to his woodshed and came back with the script that you now have.”

In that script, a man (voiced by Aleks Le) wakes from his slumber, suspended inside a water tank. He has no memory of who he is or how he got there. Over email, Le likens this character to "a newborn baby in concept but with the motor functions and capabilities of an adult." The actor wanted to give the swordsman an "unpolished way of speaking," saying, "It's a bit subtle and I'm not sure if a lot of people may pick up on it at first, but when he talks it's almost as if he's unfamiliar with how to use his own mouth. Words and syllables land in an odd way, and the diction and clarity is slightly off."

All this character knows is that there’s a spherical android of some sort floating in front of him (voiced by The Mandalorian’s Emily Swallow). Puck — named after Pac-Man’s original moniker of Puck-Man — claims he’s “the Chosen,” someone destined to escape the maze in which they are currently trapped. Whether Puck can actually be trusted or if there's more to this reality is a different matter. Puck guides the man to a sword, which he uses to cut across the jungles and barren deserts of this world to find a means of escape. 

"I was immediately drawn in and fascinated by how much it disturbed me!" Swallow says separately over email. "My associations with Pac-Man were very surface level — I remembered the pastel colors, the pixelated figures, and the sometimes monotonous repetition I felt when I played as a kid. As an actor and storyteller, I am captivated by the underbelly of the stories we tell because they give us a way to explore the very present shadow of ourselves as individuals and our culture without being called out in a way that might make us defensive. Because of this, the things that become such cultural phenomena are of even more interest to me — what is the underbelly of something as pastel pretty as Pac-Man?"

All Swallow knew from reading the script was that Puck is "feminine, kind." In speaking with casting director Ivy Isenberg, the actress learned that this kindness isn't entirely altruistic. "She was a character who adapts according to the specifics of the 'Human' she encounters that day...not because she is simply kind and soft, but so that she can get what she truly wants," Swallow explains.

What is this swordsman's purpose? “Eat,” Puck replies. That would include eating “Ghosts,” the prime Pac-Man adversaries now reimagined as carnivorous mutant monsters. “We spent a long time trying to respect the entire 50-year history with Pac-Man and did a lot of retro-style, cute cartoon Pac-Man s---,” Petty says. “Eventually, me and Dave were like, we just gotta do the John Melius version of this. What is Blood Meridian Pac-Man?” 

Conan the Barbarian, one of Melius’ many screenplays, became an inspiration for the 10-minute "Pac-Man" episode, directed by Victor Maldonado and Aldredo Torres. So did Black Mirror and even Mandy, the 2018 psychedelic horror-fantasy starring Nicolas Cage. “Pac-Man is Joe Pesci and the swordsman is Guy Pierce in Memento,” Wilson also throws out — and you know he’s not joking. 

“We got a lot into how mythic the center of Pac-Man is,” Petty explains. “Even the original game, it's very candy-colored and poppy, but you're eating pills in a labyrinth while you're being chased by Ghosts. We were in the room talking about [how] you can eat them, but you can never eat their eyes” — referring to how, in the game, a Ghost’s eyes will travel back to the center of the maze so the creature can respawn after being eaten by Pac-Man. “Which sounds deceptively haunting,” Petty continues. “Honestly, it was acknowledging that Pac-Man is the Beowulf of narrative gaming. It’s the Er text at the center of characters being in video games and trying to take that seriously. If this is a world entirely driven by hideous appetite, how does that work?” 

Traces of classic G-rated Pac-Man linger in the DNA of this dystopian tale. Cherries play a small part — one, Wilson notes, that received “a huge roar” when they screened footage at New York Comic-Con in October. That one came from Amazon’s animation development executive, Mitchell Foster. “They gave us an immense amount of freedom, but Mitchell called and was like, ‘Can we put some cherries in there?’” Wilson recalls. “With much reluctance, I was like, ‘Fine, dude.’” Considering the reaction from the geek crowd, he concedes, “Sh--, he was right.”

Other game elements are far more exaggerated for Secret Level, dark distortions that make sense for the world of this episode. "There's strength in repetition," Puck tells the swordsman as he hacks and slashes through monster after monster — not dissimilar from the player's experience of starting Pac-Man over and over again to beat the game. "We were careful not to be entirely self-referential the whole time," Petty notes. "We were always trying to be like, What would existing in this world actually be like? Respawning and dying and learning and grinding and doing it again is so central to the gaming experience, and Pac-Man especially is such a repetitive game, but it still completely works 50 years later."

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The guys note how they screen-tested the "Pac-Man" episode for general audience feedback, but Miller admits there could be a world in which fans aren't into it, given how much of a departure the short is from the source material. "I think we may get some negative [responses]," Miller says.

"I think negative things can happen sometimes when expectations don't meet reality," Wilson chimes in. "There are folks who are going to expect Pac-Man to be something and be like, 'What the f--- was that?' Tim and I had a big debate. I was like, we should start the whole series with 'Pac-Man.' He was like, 'We learned from Love Death + Robots, they won't make it past that episode.'"

"It's hard to say for sure what the reaction will be," Le comments, "but regardless if the viewer is a gamer or not, I hope they walk away thinking, 'Wow, that was rad.'"

"As with anything associated with a well-known property, I’m sure there will be a vocal contingent of lovers and a vocal contingent of critics," Swallow adds. "What I love about the concept of this whole series is that every episode is just one of countless potential inspirations sparked by the origin story that is the game. The conversation around it and the ideas generated are neither good nor bad; the fact that we are having the conversation at all is the juicy stuff.

Secret Level premieres on Prime Video this Dec. 10.