Raid: Shadow Legends, the hit mobile and desktop game from Plarium Games, is getting the TV treatment.
The fantasy role-playing game is being adapted into a limited 10-episode animated series that will release weekly on YouTube beginning on May 18. Titled Raid: Call of the Arbiter, the animated series is produced by Eric Rollman, the former president of Marvel Television and Animation, with showrunner Jay Oliva, whose past work includes directing the 2012 animated movie Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and serving as a storyboard artist for DC and Marvel films like Wonder Woman, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok and more.
The animated series features main characters from the Raid video game and centers on the Arbiter, an ancient guardian who is attempting to return to and revive the land known as Teleria, which has seemingly been abandoned by its gods and is marred in conflict.
“There’s been a significant demand from the players who want to know more about the story, more about the characters, more about the experiences,” Michael Lang, the CEO of Plarium’s parent company Pixel United, told The Hollywood Reporter. “[We were not] trying to follow all the other games companies that have had some success of late in terms of their IP. It was really more coming out of our players and wanting to extend the storyline of what what this game represents.”
Raid: Shadow Legends was first released as a mobile game in 2018 and was later made available to play on desktop.
Lang said the decision to release the series on YouTube to help the series “resonate in a global way” in comparison to if the company had put the series behind a paywall and made it only available in the U.S.
Watch the teaser below.
