New Black Mirror interactive episode "Bandersnatch"

wyo · Dec 29, 2018

Anyone watched/played this yet? I spent 3+ hours last night working through all the paths. Best retro game of 2018?

*MILD SPOILERS AHEAD*

Spoiler:

GutsDozer · Dec 30, 2018

Shit was amazing. I had to get as many endings as possible. and the 80's soundtrack and computers hooked me right away.

Naika · Dec 31, 2018

I totally loved the 'Fuck yeah' moment with his psychologist...fucking netflix.

munchiaz · Dec 31, 2018

wyo said:
Anyone watched/played this yet? I spent 3+ hours last night working through all the paths. Best retro game of 2018?

*MILD SPOILERS AHEAD*

Spoiler:

As usual with Black Mirror, it's all very meta. The year is 1984. You control the choices of a young video game programmer as he is working on a "choose your own adventure" game adapted from a book where the player controls the choices of the character. The programmer increasingly suspects he is not in control, etc.

My favorite part was the Pac-Man conspiracy theory...

"You know what Pac stands for? P-A-C. Program and Control. He’s Program and Control Man. The whole thing’s a metaphor. All he can do is consume. He’s pursued by demons that are probably just in his own head. And even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens? He comes right back in the other side. People think it’s a happy game. It’s not a happy game. It’s a fucking nightmare world. And the worst thing is? It’s real and we live in it."

That was also my favorite part as well. I played through it for a good 2+ hours yesterday, but i could not get back to the scene where it wants you to enter the phone number. I entered it wrong the first time.

DevilRedeemed · Dec 31, 2018

I didn't like it. I did like the main actor, felt bad for him. The game itself was an interesting and believable thing.
But there's something about Blackmirror as a whole,maybe the brashness by and large, which puts me off

cat · Jan 1, 2019

I haven't watched it yet, but it's one i'll take in when i get a chance, it kinda look's like the multiple choice fighting fantasy book's from the 80's, i remember the warlock of firetop mountain, i loved that.

opt2not · Jan 2, 2019

I liked the idea, and the fact they're trying this through a streaming video service, but I always hate stories that break the 4th wall. Once the story progressed to that point I was pretty much over it.

Gaston · Jan 2, 2019

I actually liked it at first but as the story progressed and became more and more meta, I kind of lost interest.
It's cool to see these interactive movies though and I would love for them to make a genuine movie like this (preferably some crazy horror theme).

Takumaji · Jan 2, 2019

Heh... Bandersnatch was the name of a super-hyped action RPG for the ZX Spectrum by Imagine, a British software company that went under in 1984. The game was part of a proposed series called Mega Games that were meant to be way ahead of the competition and push the machines (Spectrum and C64) to the limit, some hardware add-ons for it were also in development (mostly for anti-piracy purposes).

Bandersnatch never officially saw the light of day, although several people who worked for Imagine mentioned a few years ago that it was in a quite advanced stage when Imagine went bankrupt. Fans and proto hunters kept on digging for more than two decades but nothing playable has been found so far. In 2015, a prototype of the packaging for the game appeared and was sold on ebay to a collector who was kind enough to create scans of it and release them.

Now I wonder whether this new Bandersnatch game has anything to do with the Speccy one, the name isn't that common, after all.

DevilRedeemed · Jan 2, 2019

Takumaji said:
Heh... Bandersnatch was the name of a super-hyped action RPG for the ZX Spectrum by Imagine, a British software company that went under in 1984. The game was part of a proposed series called Mega Games that were meant to be way ahead of the competition and push the machines (Spectrum and C64) to the limit, some hardware add-ons for it were also in development (mostly for anti-piracy purposes).

Bandersnatch never officially saw the light of day, although several people who worked for Imagine mentioned a few years ago that it was in a quite advanced stage when Imagine went bankrupt. Fans and proto hunters kept on digging for more than two decades but nothing playable has been found so far. In 2015, a prototype of the packaging for the game appeared and was sold on ebay to a collector who was kind enough to create scans of it and release them.

Now I wonder whether this new Bandersnatch game has anything to do with the Speccy one, the name isn't that common, after all.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was inspired by/copied from the real game.

Also the initial presentation with the sharks and the old style screens is a Madworld rip off

LoneSage · Jan 2, 2019

lmbo I bing'd the coolest looking guy in that photo and his linkedin came up with that same picture: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gibson-4b977170

edit: some more, because it's pretty darn interesting seeing how those guys' careers turned out

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugeneevans

can't find Mike Glover but didn't search too hard

The dude on the left apparently committed suicide, check out what this guy who worked with him wrote wrote: http://worldofspectrum.org/tribute/en/WeatherburnIan.html

I met Ian way back in the mists of time at the Imagine offices and he treated me then with pretty much the same disdain he did until the end of our working relationship together. But that was just Ian.

He was a self-absorbed with few people skills, which worked to his detriment in the social arena but was one of his strengths in the games field.

This distance that was always present between Ian and the rest of the human race only brought him closer to the thing he was best at, writing games. His games were more than usually well-crafted with a lot of man-hours put into each.

He was sarcastic to a point where it was almost painful to hear some of the things he said. His idea of humour was almost always at somebody else's expense...but again this was just part of Ian Weatherburn and you either got over it, ignored it or if you couldn't, then stay away.

We worked quite extensively, just the two of us in our freelance days and because of his intractable manner he always said exactly what he wanted and left no room for error. Would that other coders in years to come had been as blunt or as focused.

There was no room for niceties, he was a man of few words so whenever work started, work was all there was and you did it until you finished; then it was time to clock off until tomorrow. No shooting the breeze or winding down, just down tools, goodbye, see you tomorrow.

While other, younger people came into the industry and matured and grew, Ian stayed a kind of Peter Pan figure in the background. His hands later came to hold the reins of his own company but he was always a figure on the edge of things and even though the whole ball of wax was his, he never entered centre stage.

His only true failing that led to his downfall was his trust in people he considered friends.

Ian was led astray and his financial dealings only got worse. It was sad to see but, Ian being the person he was, would not take kindly to being offered advice and told he had made a mistake. His judgement was absolute and no-one could tell him otherwise.

We parted on far from good terms.

Ian could have, I can only conjecture, been a pretty damn good coder, but I believe his communications skills or lack of would have held him back.

Most likely he would have gone Stateside and followed his first love, the almighty dollar.

I can see him now, alone but unconcerned in a house with a beach view, a fast car in the garage and the world's dodgiest collection of 80s female rockers in his cd collection.

He could have been happy. But sadly he never was.

edit double: and down the rabbit hole I go, geez thanks Tak. Check this out, apparently Psygnosis took the remains of Bandersnatch's code and finished the game their own way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brataccas

"The Black Mirror interactive film Bandersnatch, released in 2018, alludes to Imagine Software and the failed work to produce Bandersnatch. The film starts on 9 July 1984, the date of Imagine's closure, and includes a shot of the cover of Crash reporting on the closure. Within the film, the fictional software company Tuckersoft, which had developed both Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum games, places its financial future on the attempt to produce Bandersnatch, and in some scenarios falls into bankruptcy after the game fails to appear.[6]"

Good job Tak. You were right.

Takumaji · Jan 2, 2019

DevilRedeemed said:
I wouldn't be surprised if it was inspired by/copied from the real game.

Also the initial presentation with the sharks and the old style screens is a Madworld rip off

Heh, the old ad brings back memories, saw it in CRASH (Speccy magazine) back then and there also were some Psyclapse ads and even a preview in Zzap!64. It was the time of the hype years when the one-man coders of the pioneer days had turned into multi-million-dollar (or pound sterling in this case) companies and tried to outdo each other with ad campaigns that contained over-the-top promises of ground-breaking games with graphics so cool they would make your eyes fall out... needless to say that many of those big claims turned out to be wishful thinking at best or deceit at worst that lured people into shelling out big time for some unplayable garbage.

EDIT:

Cheers, Sage, I knew there was something to it.

Interesting stuff.

smokehouse · Jan 2, 2019

DevilRedeemed said:
I didn't like it. I did like the main actor, felt bad for him. The game itself was an interesting and believable thing.
But there's something about Blackmirror as a whole,maybe the brashness by and large, which puts me off

Its interesting you'd say this...I feel the same way.

I know people gush about the show but try as I may, I'm not a fan of it. I do like dark shows (for example, I'm a mega fan of the original Twilight Zone to this day), but Blackmirror just doesn't do it for me.

NeoSneth · Jan 2, 2019

I love black mirror. There are certainly episodes that are misses, but on the whole i find the brashness intriguing more than off-putting.

I typically dont do well with choose your own adventure. I cheat, i skip....i just can't be trusted with solo experiences. I liked how it cycled, so you didn't feel like you were entirely missing out. There's definitely some things I would do differently early on, so I might even give it a second shot.

The setting was done very well. I lived in england for 6 years around this exact time. Hits that nostalgia well, although I never owned a speccy. Was commodore 16 and 64 for us.

DevilRedeemed · Jan 2, 2019

Yeah WHSmiths was a good place to pick up them games. It is a decent recreation of that time.

Thing I think Blackmirror does badly is tell a story through emotion. When it tries to it just feels superficial and very English. It's immature in its composition of the human psyche, and I only mention this because it seeks out to explore it so much. Too crass for my taste. And the story telling is boring, quite flat, rigid.

NeoSneth · Jan 2, 2019

it does move rather quickly, but i think it has to be rather short. People are not going to want and revisit a rather long version of this.

cat · Jan 2, 2019

This talk about bandersnatch and imagine reminds me of the excellent video by kim justice, kim is probably the best of the youtube gaming documentary makers and this is a cracking watch, well worth 30 minutes of your time.

Takumaji · Jan 2, 2019

Seconded, Kim does great work and this Imagine docu is well made and thoroughly well researched.

wyo · Jan 2, 2019

DevilRedeemed said:
Yeah WHSmiths was a good place to pick up them games. It is a decent recreation of that time.

Thing I think Blackmirror does badly is tell a story through emotion. When it tries to it just feels superficial and very English. It's immature in its composition of the human psyche, and I only mention this because it seeks out to explore it so much. Too crass for my taste. And the story telling is boring, quite flat, rigid.

The storytelling for the episodes set in the UK is absolutely spot on, to the point of adding to the uncomfortable quality of the show. The showrunner is close to my age so it makes sense. Black Mirror evokes a bleak sense of dread unlike any other show. The anthology format does not lend itself to in depth character studies so your superficial complaint isn't really fair, IMO. The characters are secondary to the plot/premise. This also serves to emphasize the impersonal and repressive themes that are tackled.

cat · Jan 2, 2019

wyo said:
The storytelling for the episodes set in the UK is absolutely spot on, to the point of adding to the uncomfortable quality of the show. The showrunner is close to my age so it makes sense. Black Mirror evokes a bleak sense of dread unlike any other show. The anthology format does not lend itself to in depth character studies so your superficial complaint isn't really fair, IMO. The characters are secondary to the plot/premise. This also serves to emphasize the impersonal and repressive themes that are tackled.

I find the episodes hit and miss TBH, my favourite is, "the national anthem" from the first series, disturbing, cringy and funny in equal measures.

opt2not · Jan 2, 2019

My favourite episodes are the social media rating, and the optic video recording ones. The social media one was terrifying, and I think I’ve read that somewhere in China they’re actually using that system IRL.

DevilRedeemed · Jan 2, 2019

wyo said:
The storytelling for the episodes set in the UK is absolutely spot on, to the point of adding to the uncomfortable quality of the show. The showrunner is close to my age so it makes sense. Black Mirror evokes a bleak sense of dread unlike any other show. The anthology format does not lend itself to in depth character studies so your superficial complaint isn't really fair, IMO. The characters are secondary to the plot/premise. This also serves to emphasize the impersonal and repressive themes that are tackled.

This was a good post. But aim not convinced, I don't like how the characters are constructed and the bleak-but-meatheaded outlook on life and society. It's as subtle as a chainsaw. The implicit repressive, nuhilistic nature of that universe is largely unrefined and not fully conceived. Not just too ambitious for its own good but also too dumb to know what to do with itself.

evil wasabi · Jan 4, 2019

I didn’t go through all the branches as some did. I wanted to go back and go through fresh but realized that part of the movie was that going back things are different. You are see bits of the past but things are changed. Colin, for example, upgrades each time. So it’s hard to explore “branches” when it’s really just one branch from the start, which I guess was the idea with Stefan and his coding.

I think this wasn’t really a Black Mirror episode, as it wasn’t pushing the dystopian narratives. But it’s okay, as it probably helped promote the episode, I guess. Preferably, NFLX would have made it a new serial completely, and patent the interactive design. This is critical for NFLX moving into 2019, as Disney is coming.

Anyhow, it was a fun adventure. I think it could have been better, darker, etc. supposedly the episode had delay issues, so the theme of the game being delayed was kind of meta.

NeoSneth · Jan 4, 2019

Evil Wasabi said:
Preferably, NFLX would have made it a new serial completely, and patent the interactive design. This is critical for NFLX moving into 2019, as Disney is coming.

Probably not novel enough for patent. This existed on DVD players already. My friend really got into Silent Steel

DevilRedeemed · Jan 4, 2019

Logical next step will be QTEs

Bandersnatch choices of action where ridiculous. You didn't really have any hand in narating anything. Pouring tea over the computer or smashing it is a really strange choice to be given

New Black Mirror interactive episode "Bandersnatch"

King of Spammers

Robot Master., Master Tasuke, Eat Your, Heart Out

Street Hoop Star

Robert Garcia's Butler

teh

It's Time Us Welsh, Stood on our own 2 feet, WEL_S

Fu'un-Ken Master

Mature's Make-up Artist

Master Enabler

teh

A Broken Man

Master Enabler

I was Born This Ugly.,

Ned's Ninja Academy Dropout

teh

Ned's Ninja Academy Dropout

It's Time Us Welsh, Stood on our own 2 feet, WEL_S

Master Enabler

King of Spammers

It's Time Us Welsh, Stood on our own 2 feet, WEL_S

Fu'un-Ken Master

teh

The Jongmaster

Ned's Ninja Academy Dropout

teh