Charlie Brooker Black Mirror’s creator (and former PC gaming critic) on Bandersnatch.
The creator of dystopian anthology series Black Mirror on Bander snatch, an interactive episode inspired by games and gaming culture.
Interactive storytelling is nothing new, but something as mainstream as Netflix embracing the concept is a big deal. Bandersnatch, the newest episode of Black Mirror, lets you make choices that determine the path the story takes. And you can access it using just Netflix and a TV remote. I talked with writer Charlie Brooker about the episode, how it was made, and what inspired it. How did you pitch the idea of an interactive Black Mirror story to Netflix? They actually asked us. We had a meeting at their headquarters in Los Angeles—which, by the way, has M&M dispensers on every floor. That’s my overriding memory. Todd Yellin and Carla Engelbrecht from the tech division showed us some of their interactive capabilities, which were quite rudimentary at the time. Then they asked us if we’d be interested in coming up with a Black Mirror story using this technology.
And we said no! Well, we said yes, that’s interesting, we’ll go and think about it. Then, later, we came up with a story outline that could work. I wanted to do a retro episode that was actually set in the past. We’d done San Junipero before, which was set in 1987, but it was really the future. I also knew that I wanted to do a story about old, old computer games.
And from there we had the idea about a character in the past and someone in the future controlling him, trying to make sure he writes this particular computer game because it’s important in the future. A bit like the plot of The Terminator, basically. And then I thought, ‘What if the person giving this character instructions is you, the viewer? Hang on a minute, that sounds like it could be an interactive thing. Oh shit, that’s a good idea!’ And so we went back to Netflix and said, ‘Okay, we can do one now.’ Why were you initially reluctant to make an interactive episode of television? The first FMV games I can remember playing were Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace, and some of those LaserDisc arcade games like Firefox. I was writing for PC Zone in the ’90s, and there were a lot of them released on PC, too. Stuff like Under A Killing Moon and Night Trap, which caused a huge deal of controversy at the time. But the problem with these kinds of CD-ROM games was that they weren’t as satisfying to play as something like Sam & Max.
There’s a lot of waiting around and you’re constantly taken out of the story by cuts to black while it loads in the next bit of video. Even flicking between scenes on a DVD there’s a little gap. So I was a bit worried about Bandersnatch being like that. Even in more up-to-date games like Heavy Rain and Until Dawn, which are in similar territory, there are breaks for loading. So my big concern was making it work seamlessly. We had a lot of technical restrictions at first, like clips and choice points needing to be a certain length. But they refined it over time until it was less restrictive. How does Bandersnatch actually work on a technical level, did you go through any iterations of the design? When the widescreen bars lift up and your choices appear, that all happens via the UI. While that’s happening it’s caching in the next two bits of video in the background, ready to play when you make a choice. So if you’re watching on a console or fairly up-to-date TV, and your internet connection is good, you’ll get no gap.
We put a lot of thought into designing the interface. At first I wanted the choices to be images, because Netflix is a global platform and we wanted it to be universal. But their tech became sophisticated enough that we could choose the font and have choices in different languages.
We wanted it to feel like a kind of graceful magic trick. I was skeptical at first, and didn’t think it would be possible. We had a basic playable version of it for the edit, and there were gaps in it. But when I first saw it playing in full, actually on the Netflix platform, it was quite emotional. How else did you experiment with the format of interactive storytelling? When you watch the episode on a games console the controller rumbles at each choice point. Netflix showed us an early demo, and the vibration was way too high, so I said, as a reference, go away and play Forza Horizon 4, when you drive over some leaves, that’s the level of intensity we want. That was some weird feedback to give.
The strength of the vibration actually increases when it’s a big decision, so we did experiment a little with it. I do have an idea about how we could translate it to the Oculus Rift, by the way. But in case we do it, I’m not gonna say what it is. It would be relatively easy, and we’d have one big surprise in it. But I definitely think we could do a VR version. A branching story like this must be pretty difficult to structure. How did you map the narrative out? Annabel Jones (Black Mirror’s executive producer) and I got a whiteboard and a marker and started making a
flowchart, but then we were like, ‘Wait, we’re going to need a lot more whiteboards here.’ So we looked into using flowchart software. But I wanted something more complex than a flowchart, which led me to tools like inklewriter, which was user friendly, but fairly unreliable and would crash a lot. The tool I wanted didn’t seem to exist, but people kept saying that I should use Twine.
I took a look at Twine and I thought, ‘That looks complicated!’ I did a bit of HTML in the ’90s, so it was kind of familiar, but I still didn’t want to learn it. I’m 47! I don’t have room in my head! But eventually I got to grips with it, getting it to remember choices and so on.
I kept going back to Netflix with stuff I’d put together in Twine and saying, ‘Is this possible?’ They would never say no, but they would give it a shot, and nine times out of ten they’d pull it off. So, actually, a lot of my original coding, which I’m sure is very messy and amateurish and shit, sort of ended up being translated directly across to their new interactive platform. I like how in some endings, despite sacrificing so much of himself to make it, Stefan’s game gets a bad or mediocre review. I was thinking about game reviews in general, especially from the era the story is set. I was born in 1971, and I used to read Crash magazine in my early teenage years. I also used to watch Micro Live on the BBC in the ’80s, which would hold videogames at arm’s length. They were like, ‘Oh, these silly games,’ but that’s probably what 90% of the audience was tuning in for!
I remember when they’d have someone in a bowtie reviewing text adventures like The Hobbit and other games, which translated directly into Micro Play, our homage to the show in Bandersnatch. We had Paul Bradley playing this reviewer called Robin, who we deliberately made look like an unusually young person in a bowtie, which just amused me. Some game developers have been quite negative about Bandersnatch. Did you expect that kind of reaction from the industry? Some games people were saying that this is nothing new, that games have done it better, but they’re not running on Netflix! This isn’t a gaming platform, so we had to build all this stuff from the ground up and learn it as we went. But any response is a valid one. I’m the last person who can moan about anyone reviewing it harshly either as a show or a game, because I’ve dished out enough negative reviews of both in my time!
But steeped within the episode is a lot of stuff about the nascent British games industry of the early ’80s, and a lot of thought went into the detail of that. So I hoped that would convince anyone thinking we know nothing about games that we do. If we’d done Bandersnatch as a PC game or a PlayStation game it would’ve been a very different thing.
I slightly roll my eyes when people say the episode is a new form of storytelling, because it really isn’t. It’s basically the same as Dragon’s Lair, but just a different iteration of that. But what I do think is new is that it’s on a streaming platform, a very mainstream thing, and you can play it with your TV remote. And if nongamers like the idea of interactive storytelling, it might lead them to try something like a Telltale game. What has the reaction to Bandersnatch been like in general? It’s designed so that you should probably sample about two endings and I’ve been surprised by the number of people trying to get them all. I wasn’t expecting anyone to do that, and it wasn’t really designed like that. We wanted people to get a couple of endings, hopefully enjoy it, then talk to someone else about what decisions they made.
Some people have said it’s too complicated and they don’t understand it. Some people have said they’re shit at it, which is odd, and take it really personally. And some people have said it’s too simple.
One reaction I don’t quite get is some people who complain that if they smash up Stefan’s computer, or hit some other fail state, they’ll be like, ‘What’s the point if I can just try again?’ But nobody complains about Mario when he falls to his death and you lose a life and get to try again. No one goes, ‘What was the point of that? Why are Nintendo forcing Mario to continue on through the Mushroom Kingdom?’
“Some people have said they’re shit at it, which is odd”