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'Bandersnatch': The Works That Inspired the 'Black Mirror' Interactive Feature (2019)
by rafaepta
This is such a fascinating & personally inspiring time for me as a programmer.
The real game Bandersnatch (as a business folly) was something else - the "coming soon" advert from just before Imagine's bankruptcy would probably ring an alarm bell now - https://nosher.net/archives/computers/imagine_eugeneevans_yo...
Some of the programmers of Bandersnatch did release Gift From The Gods from the ashes of Bandersnatch - which I definitely had on my Spectrum! But it was very confusing - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/13/giftgod.htm
This 1984 documentary from the BBC archive covers Imagine's growth & demise, must have been a great visual reference for Brooker making the show, and the top comment has some more detail on Imagine's hiring spree - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buuUZFh_pyk also also check out 4:30 or so, where they show the game and the device that will "eventually be reduced to a small cartridge and sold with the game"!!
Also also the name Ritman is probably a reference to Jon Ritman, programmer of the brilliant Head Over Heels. But he was nothing to do with Imagine. He still gives interviews and seems lovely.
How did they miss Night Trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Trap from the list? It was "so terrifying" that Congress had a hearing to ban it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVnL484jbk
Years later that game was turned into a DVD film by choosing specific story paths. You can find it online at ok.ru, but don't click that link without a really, really strong adblocker. The Russian site tries to install malware. https://ok.ru/video/3334939150907
the classic was dragon's lair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_ga...
laserdiscs were a weird 70s/80s analog optical video disc technology where many players had a db-9 (edit: just looked these up, apparently they had a db-25 connector) serial port for a serial control protocol. dragon's lair was a classic stand up video game cabinet with a laserdisc player and a simple control system that created a "choose your own adventure" interface for the video content.
some of the first computer programs i ever wrote were atari st programs for controlling a laserdisc player. (we had one in elementary school)
If you're a Philip K. Dick-head, you might enjoy the episodes of the podcast Weird Studies which cover his life and work.
The hosts often focus on his Exegesis, mentioned in the article. It feels like a privilege to hear two very smart academics engage in longform discussion - in which they're unconstrained, and clearly having genuine fun - about Dick's work.
More broadly, the non-Dick episodes are also wonderful, and often cover the kind of art I typically see discussed here.
You can dip in for times they cover work you love already, to hear their interesting (and academically, often quite new) perspectives on your favourites, or listen from the start, chronologically, as a kind of curriculum in the weird. Which I found to be an incredibly useful thing.
I'm not associated in any way, just a fan, and think a lot of users here would enjoy it: https://www.weirdstudies.com/10
Fantastically fun when it was released.
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Or maybe the AI could puke up some bland, middle-of-the-road trite pap while putting actual human talent out of work!
Both require human talent, actually fairly similar talents, just in a different form.
My AI dungeon master is just what you seek- but it will kill you... so you tell me if its "tripe" Lisa Simpson.
I think you're being down-voted because the down-voters can't imagine AI video ever being really good. I can though, and I think indeed a "made for you" adventure may be quite nice. It could also suck, but I'm not so religious about AI that I would down-vote you because of any negative feeling I may have about AI.
I down-voted because I can't imagine AI video ever being moral, not good. It's copyright theft.
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I visited Psygnosis in the early days, we sold them an Internet connection. Hard to describe the kind of creative energy emanating from their building. Such talent.
>Hard to describe
But why not try? It is history, and you are a unique witness of it
An overwhelming positivity (we're going to be successful), creativity (we are making something genuinely new), quality (this is some kind of art form), and technical excellence (we're doing things head and shoulders above current levels of advancement). As a customer... "we want the best".
I'd love to hear stories about Psygnosis or DMA Design. To this day my favorite game of theirs is Walker, followed closely by Infestation.
I wanted to re-watch this on Netflix but it seems they removed it some time ago and have no plans to bring it back. It seems the interactivity features were obsoleted from their app platform as they were hard to support?
> as they were hard to support?
X to doubt. The tech worked fine. The real issue is that nobody wants choose-your-own-adventure TV, which has been proven again and again.
My kid loved that interactive Bear Grylls stuff, still talks about it sometimes (what his wrong choices were etc.) Sometimes I think they kill this stuff before it get mainstream. Also, some way to control via the TV, or Chromecast may have made this more popular.
I remember Bear Grills "You vs. Wild" as one of the most well-known interactive shows. It's strange it's never mentioned in articles about interactive Netflix features.
I see.
But surely Netflix could have setup 1 to 3 of the "best" variants of the Bandersnatch and let people watch those? Even a "directors cut" based on how the director chose the path, would suffice.
The content is entirely gone right now. Which is pretty tragic as it was excellent.
> The content is entirely gone right now.
It's officially gone, but you can acquire the raw video through other means and plug it into this open source reimplementation of the frontend: https://mehotkhan.github.io/BandersnatchInteractive/
It's a pity Brooker didn't have some residual IP control so it could have been republished elsewhere. I honestly think it was a little masterpiece that deserved to be saved.
This is really exciting, but I'm having an immense amount of trouble finding the single 1080p-quality release that is listed as known to work.
Edit: For that matter, I actually can't seem to find the 720p releases either.
Not sure if any of these work but worth a try:
I am not an expert but as long as the video is playable by the browser (x264 - Chrome apparently supports the most formats) and the same duration (05:12:14) it should work.
This is from 7 years ago but you can see if there's any helpful discussion attempting to use the initial release: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bandersnatch/comments/adnn2h/github...
That was a standalone piece though, rather than some sort of trend. The choose-your-own nature of it was integral to the story and referential to the contemporary books which were CYO.
Your theory fits fine with “We’re not going to make a series like this or turn it into a genre”, but not so well with “we already made this thing and it was really popular, but we’ve decided to take it off the platform”
Netflix did try to turn it into a genre, they made a few dozen CYOA specials before giving up.
https://www.polygon.com/22286070/netflix-interactive-shows-m...
It makes no sense to me at all. If they don't want to support interactivity features in their overall Netflix.com front-end, they should release a separate app.
They're still trying to get into video games—they just bought the rights to FIFA, for goodness sakes—so they should make use of their ready-made content.
There is no way the actual code for selecting choices is particularly complicated. Maybe as part of a larger codebase it could become tech debt, but on its own?
A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app (even if it's 100% locked to bug and security patching).
If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it". I.e. they have the numbers for how many people were watching the limited interactive content from years ago, they know whether they plan on having more interactive video content, and they know how much it is to maintain across different apps (and likely don't want to fragment their service availability to support something they identify as a declining niche). Just because they may be getting into games does not mean it makes sense to have support for other interactive stuff people hardly ever watch.
They tried something different, it didn't work out to be popular enough to bother with for the rest of time, and they moved on.
> If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it"
That's what I mean, too difficult for the expected return.
> A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app
We're talking about, what, Android and iOS? Those are the only platforms where Netflix has been publishing games AFAIK. I'm not suggesting they maintain it on every platform with a Netflix app!
I just don't believe it would be much work. If it's an app, it doesn't even have to handle streaming, it can just play the local video file. Heck, we have a fan-made codebase we can use as a reference:
https://github.com/joric/bandersnatch/blob/master/bandersnat...
<500 lines of code, plus two json files which are admittedly much longer but look auto-generated. I assume they came from Netflix, which means they exist already.
Even acknowledging that an official version might necessitate more than this, it just shouldn't be a big lift, even relative to a very small number of users. If it is a big lift, then something else is very wrong inside Netflix.
Netflix must have spent millions of dollars producing Bandersnatch. It was critically acclaimed. I can understand not making more—but not doing a modicum of work to keep it in their catalog?
Probably couldn't find anyone willing to put their job on the line to maintain it. Netflix culture is big on chasing "impact" and other subjective metrics. Putting your hand up to maintain legacy only used by a small group of users is a good way to get yourself absolutely slaughtered even if the thing was liked. IIRC they had a sports quote which summarizes this better.
A shame it can't be viewed anymore, it has all the makings of a cult classic.
The guy who coded the actual Nohzdyve game (that runs on real ZX Spectrum hardware) is Matt Westcott aka Gasman. He's a demoscener and has made some brilliant speccie demos. https://demozoo.org/sceners/5879/
There is a way, if you manage to procure the video file from some shady site
Copyright in service of commercial interest is such a cancer, rotting away human culture. God bless anyone who disregards it.
Colin Ritman is so Demis Hassabis.
This has the same vibe I get from tech-sphere articles. The number of people who've read The Jabberwocky dwarfs this "interactive feature". Reading this article outside of the context it was written makes it sound tone-deaf
Crafted by Rajat
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