We Could Have Had A Secret Level Episode Where Halo’s Master Chief & Doom Slayer Teamed Up, But…

Secret Level’s first season on Amazon Prime was quite a ride despite being just advertisements for games past, present, and killed within two weeks. Still, there were a lot of scrapped ideas, but none as egregious as the headline.

Creators Tim Miller and Dave Wilson revealed they pitched a crossover episode with Halo’s Master Chief and Doom’s Doom Slayer/Doom Guy, but was turned down and denied permission to. Specifically, both IP holders -Microsoft and id Software respectively- turned it down.

“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.

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.’ “

Both creators also tried to get permission to do a Half-Life episode via Valve, but that was also turned down.

Miller and Wilson said that the current episodes in Season 1 were the best they could do since their pitches for dream gaming crossovers were turned down. After all, there are a lot of constraints when getting permission to use a game IP as the basis of an animation.

“It’s not like we could just have anything we wanted, or they were all available. … we could make 10 seasons of this and still not run out of games that we like.”

Had Microsoft said “yes”, id Software (owned by Bethesda who is owned by Microsoft) would follow suite and went along with a win. This could have been Microsoft’s way to bring Xbox back to the limelight following all the not-so-hot news and new multiplatform approach. It won’t fix the problems outright, but it would have been a nice first step. Alas, they would rather just say “no” to risks like these.

For more Secret Level features, check out our review of Season 1.