Raid: Shadow Legends is the latest video game to get an animated show adaptation, with ten shorts coming to YouTube in May.
Publisher Pixel United and developer Plarium announced that episodes of Raid: Call of the Arbiter, coming in at five minutes each, will premiere once per week starting on May 18, 2023. Promising cinematic-quality animation, the shorts look to elevate Raid’s core characters with deeper, more immersive storylines.
Rollman Entertainment CEO and former president of Marvel Television Eric Rollman will produce the series, Lex + Otis CEO Jay Oliva will be showrunner, and composer Jesper Kyd (who has worked on Assassin’s Creed and Borderlands) will create original music for the show.
“We’re thrilled to be working with such a high calibre team on this exciting new series that takes Raid: Shadow Legends to the next level for our fans,” said Plarium vice president creative and executive producer Nicholas Day.
“We want to establish Raid as a bankable evergreen IP, with enough strength to do more, all while appealing to our core fans and capturing interest from a broader audience.”
Raid is entering a competitive market, however, as the calibre of animated video game adaptations has arguably grown considerably in the last couple of years.
Arcane, the League of Legends series, won IGN’s animated series of the year in 2021 and was the first streaming series to win an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Programme. It also earned a 10/10 in our review, as we said: “Arcane is the first video game adaptation that’s truly a masterpiece, breaking new ground for what’s possible in TV animation.”
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners premiered to similar fanfare last year, earning Crunchyroll and IGN’s award for the best anime show of 2022. In our 9/10 review of this one, we said: “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners delivers a satisfying return to Night City that does a better job exploring why Mike Pondsmith’s famous location became so iconic in the first place.”
Correction, March 13: A previous version of this story had the incorrect premiere date for Raid: Call of the Arbiter.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.