Sometime before Sony hero shooter Concord released, before it was even fully revealed to the public, the producers of Amazon TV series Secret Level—a collection of animated videogame shorts premiering on Prime Video on December 10—started working on an episode based on the game. They didn’t know that the short sci-fi tale they were animating would become a message from beyond the grave.
The episode, which I’ve seen in advance of the show’s premiere, was supposed to come out in a world where Concord was, if not a Helldivers 2-level hit, a popular and well-liked game. In reality, Concord barely lasted a week. Sony quickly shut the competitive multiplayer game down due to lack of interest, and then shuttered developer Firewalk Studios, which it had acquired partway through Concord’s development.
I played Concord and I thought it was fun enough, and it was technically sound, but its Bungie-influenced arena shooter stylings just didn’t draw a crowd, and neither did its all-in commitment to building a Guardians of the Galaxy-like sci-fi universe with weekly cutscenes. They were going to follow the exploits of a crew of Freegunners—Concord’s name for its roguish space mercenaries—whose realistically-rendered faces were a little uncanny.
The Secret Level episode portrays the most important moment in the history of the Freegunners, when a heroic crew of outlaws stole a map of navigation routes that allow free travel through the galaxy for enemies of The Guild, a powerful policing body.
At the end of the short adventure, we jump to a space pub in the present of Concord’s timeline, where the legendary story has just been retold. There, we glimpse the arm of one of Concord’s mascots—Lennox, the green guy—and of course we’re supposed to think, ‘Hey, I know that guy!’ But no one does know much about the character, outside of his creators. What we got of Concord’s story from the first trailers and cutscenes tell us that he’s a daredevil who really loves hot sauce, but there were supposed to have been over a dozen more in-game cinematics by now.
The episode comes across like a transmission from a spirit that doesn’t know it’s dead yet, one that still believes everything went right for Concord and the new game studio. It’s the 13th episode of the series—unlucky, eh?—and it’ll drop on December 17, although I found its eerie context more notable than the short story itself.
Concord is far from the only multiplayer game—or game in general—to struggle or crater this year, although it was the most dramatic impact event. We just learned that Ubisoft isn’t going to keep trying to build an audience for free-to-play shooter XDefiant, and it’s been an unprecedented year for studio closures and layoffs. More than 300 developers lost their jobs just this week, and thousands more jobs were cut this year.
As for the rest of Secret Level, we watched and rated each episode and liked some of them, but on the whole, the animated shorts didn’t charm us much.
