Secret Level Creators Pitched a Master Chief/Doom Slayer Crossover Episode, but the Answer Was No

The creators of Secret Level have revealed they pitched a Master Chief/Doom Slayer crossover episode that was turned down.

Season 1’s 15 episodes are each based on a different video game, some of which are pretty surprising picks for an animated adaptation. There’s a Pac-Man episode, an Unreal Tournament episode, and even an episode based on Sifu.

Speaking to Collider, creators Tim Miller and Dave Wilson discussed some of the feedback to Amazon’s anthology series, including criticism about the video games selected for the episodes themselves.

“I get a little chafed when I read online, and they’re like, ‘Hold on, these assholes took Spelunky when they could have taken Halo?’ Or something like that,” Miller said. “I’m like, ‘Man, you think that we didn’t talk to Halo or something?’ ”

Wilson went on to reveal both he and Miller wanted to make a Master Chief/Doom Slayer crossover episode, and in fact worked on a pitch for Microsoft and Doom developer id Software, but it failed to go anywhere.

“The creative director at id [Software] is a good friend of ours, and so are folks at Microsoft, so we made a big plea because one of the things both Tim and I would love to do is do something that isn’t currently available in the games, like crossovers,” Wilson explained.

“We wanted to make a Master Chief/Doom Slayer crossover episode, and I spent a whole weekend crafting this impassioned letter of my childhood. And it’s exactly what Tim said; they were like, ‘Nah.’ “

Miller then said the pair “begged” for Half-Life, which also didn’t go anywhere.

Overall, Miller said the creators of Secret Level “did the best we could” given the constraints they were under and the process involved in getting permission to use a video game IP as the basis of an animation. “It’s not like we could just have anything we wanted, or they were all available,” he said. “… we could make 10 seasons of this and still not run out of games that we like.”

With Secret Level Season 2 confirmed, Miller and Wilson will get the chance to adapt more video games, although there’s no release window yet. Miller said he’d like to release Secret Level episodes in some form “on a yearly cadence,” but “that requires a lot of faith.”

It would presumably also require a lot of people. During the same interview, Miller revealed an eye-watering 2,500 artists across 20 counties worked on Secret Level during the four years from inception to completion.

In the shorter term, Space Marine 2 modders have added the axe from Secret Level’s Warhammer 40,000 episode into the game, delighting fans.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].