There is an incredibly weird situation that’s about to unfold, where the upcoming Secret Level video game anthology series on Amazon is will feature an episode focused on Concord, the instantly-killed PlayStation live service game that did not survive more than two weeks in the wild.
There was some speculation that maybe its episode would be erased from Secret Level because of this, but that’s not happening. I figured this would be the case as work on it was probably already done or almost done, and now the creator of the series, Tim Miller, is talking about it. And he sounds a bit sad. Here he is with Rolling Stone:
"I don't feel bad that it's a part of the show," Miller said, "because I think it's an episode that turned out really well, and you can kind of see the potential of this world and the characters. If it's the remaining vestige of that product, I hope the developers feel that it's in some way worthy, just a little bit, of the blood, sweat, and tears they put into it."
"There was no nicer, more invested group of developers than the team on Concord," he continued. "I honestly don't understand why it didn't work. I know that they were trying to do the best they could, and they were a talented group of artists, so I feel terrible for that."
There is a new trailer for Secret Level out today, and while Concord is in fact listed, I had trouble pulling out featured scenes I could identify as definitely being from the world of the game:
Concord being featured in Secret Level, likely not a cheap bit of promotion, is an indication that Sony had big plans for the IP going forward, which took years of development and reportedly $200 million to make it to release. Now, it’s gone, its studio disbanded.
I do not think Concord’s failure necessitates its Secret Episode level being bad. There were sparks of interesting lore in Concord at launch, not really among its cutscenes, but there were portions of the game where you could read about the world they had created, which clearly a lot of thought had gone into. Perhaps some of that could be realized here, and we could see what could have been. Or if not, maybe it’s further confirmation that this IP was always going nowhere.
Concord has been popular to dunk on, but it’s really just more sad than anything, as it was years of work thrown into a furnace and a whole lot of people lost their jobs. We’ll see if Secret Level lets it go out on a slightly more positive note.