Not long ago I wrote an article talking about a new type of game proposed in the 1980’s by Imagine Software called the “mega game” which utilized additional hardware for the ZX Spectrum and/or Commodore 64. One of these mega games that were promised was called Bandersnatch however, like the other 5 or so games mentioned it never came to fruition. That is, not until 2018 when an interactive movie was created and released for an unusual streaming platform that was previously not related to gaming at all. That platform is Netflix, the online streaming TV and movie platform. While all the rest of it’s content is completely non-interactive, mostly being traditional movies and television series, Bandersnatch is different. It’s an interactive movie, much like the old FMV games from 1990s like Psychic Detective on the 3DO or Dragon’s Lair. However this is a modern production that was well made and a healthy budget. It was part of the popular TV series Black Mirror that is a sort of modern take of the old black and white classic TV show The Twilight Zone, however it explores more modern mysteries and anomalies of life that come with the tidal wave of technology which has completely changed our entire way of life. It commonly explores themes of neural implants, transferring of consciousness, digital consciousness, travelling through time, paranormal encounters and other similar events.
In 2018 one of the director’s of Black Mirror created the interactive movie called Bandersnatch. It contains just over 5 hours of edited footage, with quite a bit of repeating segments. Overlayed onto the footage, at specific “choice points” the screen is split in two and you are given the ability to pick the direction that the movie takes by controlling the actions of the main character Stephan Butler. You can see an example in the image above, showing the first choice point in the game where you simply select which cereal you would like for breakfast. I’m quite partial to frosties myself and have never heard of sugar puffs so that was my initial choice. As you might expect from only 5 hours of footage many decisions don’t have much significance and the results are virtually the same no matter which path you choose. However the game is very cleverly constructed, it has many references to other episodes in the Black Mirror series and to future events that happen later in the game. As each choice point has only two resulting paths it results in separate, parallel time lines where the player is doing the opposite action or just a different action. It is represented by a glyph that illustrates one path diverging into two which looks like a lower-case h but with the top protusion in the letter being in the middle of the letter and it’s squared instead of curved. This glyph plays an important role in the game and in the entire Black Mirror series, cropping up in many episodes.
The game follows Stephan Butler a 19 year old living with his dad in Thames Valley, England in as he wakes up one morning in July 1984. In the days before the movie takes place he had contacted a [fictional] software developer Tuckersoft and arranged to meet with the boss and show him the game that he has been programming for the ZX Spectrum 48k, called “Bandersnatch” which was based on a choose your own adventure book by a fictional writer “Jerome F. Davies”. The person playing JFD is none other then the famed real-life game programmer Jeff Minter of Lllamasoft. He made games for 8 bit, 16 bit and modern consoles and computers including Attack of the Mutant Camels and Tempest 2000. In the film the character he plays go crazy from writing the Bandersnatch novel which together with the multiple, parallel branching realities, the glyph and regularly consumption of psychedelic drugs loses his mind and murders his wife before he is arrested, tried and convicted. The main character faces a similar fate as he tries to port the book to the the Spectrum computer and is living through the player (you if you are playing the game) making choices for him as he is conscious that he isn’t making the decisions on his own. It is very cleverly designed and written and it works on many levels. I don’t want to give too much away as it’s best to experience the game for yourself. If you don’t want spoilers revealed then it’s best to not read any further.
The fictional game programmer in the film, Colin Ritman is working on a game for the ZX Spectrum 48k when Stephan first meets him in the Tuckersoft office. He sees the game being played in the film, it’s called Nohzdyve and is a game where the player jumps out of a building head first and has to collect eye balls for points whilst avoiding obstacles. If it seems like a strange game concept that’s because it actually references an optional scene in the movie where Stephan and Colin take LSD in his apartment and he explains to Stephan about multiple timeline’s existing which he then attempts to prove by having one of the pair kill themselves by jumping out the apartment window. While Stephan is scared and says that “you’d die”, Colin says that it wouldn’t matter because there are other timelines. So the player has a choice of who jumps from the balcony, if Colin is chosen then he suddenly disappears from the current timeline. If Stephan is selected to jump then a new timeline starts and the game’s events start a fresh. The Nohzdyve game is more than just a movie prop as the production studio that made Bandersnatch recruited a game programmer actually make the game. In one of the ending’s of Bandersnatch you see Stephan put a tape in his Sony Walkman that is labelled “Bandersnatch demo”, when he plays it instead of music you hear 8-bit game tape loading sounds. When the audio is recorded and then loaded into a real ZX Spectrum it produces a QR code which leads to an online download link to the Nohzdyve tape ROM. The ROM can be loaded with a ZX Spectrum, so the game can be experienced in real life.
The objective of Bandersnatch isn’t exactly clear, one scene suggests that the whole point of the game is just for the entertainment of the player or “controlling spirit” as it’s refered to in the game world. However one of the apparent several objectives of the games appears to be for Stephan to finish programming Bandersnatch and get a good rating for it on an 1980’s British TV show that reviews computer games. In the ending where Stephan finishes the game and gets a 5 star rating from the show, Stephan ends up being locked up and arrested for his father’s death. Colin Ritman’s daughter Pearl Ritman then reboots the game in the modern day which is the actual Bandersnatch game that you are playing. So the whole universe becomes a bit of a paradox of itself. The other endings explore what happens when Stephan changes the timeline of the circumstances around his mother’s death. No matter what happens she get’s delayed and has to take the later train which get’s derailed, but Stephan can join her on the train as a child which makes him suddenly pass away in the present day timeline while he is in a session with his therapist. In another timeline you find out that his mother’s death is staged when he is 5 years old as a “trauma inception” event as part of an MK Ultra experiment. Yes you read correctly, in one of the timelines his father is a scientist employed by the government as part of the infamous MK Ultra experiments. These experiments involve administering psychadelics (namely LSD) to unsuspecting participants and causing trauma in subjects in order to control and manipulate people.
Throughout the course of the game Stephan eventually works out that he is being controlled by an external force. Despite his declining mental state he is given clues to this strange reality and together with the sensation’s he experiences he begins to piece it together. One day when he is programming on his Spectrum he get’s the urge to destroy his work either by pouring tea over the computer or smashing it. He resists the urge and then attempts to converse with the player who’s controlling him. At this point you can either tell him that this is an interactive show on Netflix or you can flash him the line-splitting glyph. If you flash the glyph on the screen he immediately thinks that there is nothing he can do to stop being controlled and can’t resist the urge to murder his dad. If you are in the MK Ultra timeline you can tell him about the project which is called “PACS” in the game, it stands for “Program and Control Study”. Telling him about this will also lead him to murdering his dad as his (apparent) “dad” is actually a CIA scientist that has been manipulating and controlling him his whole life. Stephan does not take it well when he finds out. The ironic thing is that the whole of his reality is actually mirrored in the Bandersnatch book and subsequently the game that he is making. There is even a government conspiracy branch which he programs late into the game which actually mirrors the role of his dad with the PACS experiment. There is a scene which shows his dad in the 1960’s administering psychadelic’s to 5 year old Stephan by lacing confectionary with LSD and then taking him through a secret complex to the room where his trauma inception event occurs. The corridoor that he is walking down looks exactly like the corridoors of the Bandersnatch game down to the pipes running along the roof which split from one section to two, mirroring the divergent timelines glyph.
While working on the game, Stephan is recommended psychadelic music by Colin Ritman to help him “get into the flow”. While at the WH Smith’s retail store (the same store that will later stock his game) he has a choice of purchasing a record from Tangerine Dream or Isao Tomita. Both were artists that used early synthesizer sounds in their music creations. That choice dictates how the remainder of the movie will sound but doesn’t appear to change any of the actual movie events. While buying the record he spots a book on JFD and buys that too. The book explains Jerome’s life and what happened to him at the end of his life while he was making the Bandersnatch book. It goes into detail about his involvement with people holding extreme beliefs and how he eventually went crazy when trying to write the complex narrative pathways of Bandersnatch. He began to notice the glyph during his planning as it shows up when depicting one event leading to two choices of action. All this time his wife is spiking his food with psychadelic drugs and so he goes crazy believing that reality is predetermined and that it’s his fate to murder his wife. Stephan goes through almost the exact same thing and reading about what happened to Jerome in the book only makes this precipitate faster. Colin Ritman later gives Stephan a VHS tape of a documentary about JFD. Stephan puts the video on while he is working on Bandersnatch and this causes a sudden realization that the plans in his game have the glyph plastered all throughout them. This causes him to freakout and then go on to travel through time using a mirror and either find out about PACS or the location of his toy rabbit which his dad hid and lead to his 5 year old self no catching the same train as his mom.
If all this sounds very complicated and is hard to follow that’s because it is complicated and it’s very difficult to explain in a linear way because it’s a story of many complex branching narratives. It’s best to experience this for yourself, even if you have read this far and so know some information that can be considered spoilers. The game will still be a fresh and unique experience, even if you play it now. I made the mistake of downloading the game’s footage before fully realizing that it was a game that I could still play. It did occur to me that it was an interactive movie and I looked it up and found out it was an interactive movie on Netflix. Because I don’t have Netflix I thought that meant I could not experience the movie in it’s interactive form so I just enjoyed watching the footage in it’s linear form which was extremely repetitive. It was only later when it hit me that it may actually be emulated in some form and so I only looked into out after I’d already watched the footage several time. There’s an itch.io online application that allows you to experience the game interactively, like it was originally presented on Netflix. All you need is the ripped movie file which you can obtain pretty easily from bittorrent by searching piratebay (for example). The correct movie file should be 5 hours and 12 minutes long. The itch.io program is run in Google Chrome which accesses the Bandersnatch movie file from your hard drive. I have included the link to the itch.io page in the relevant links section below.
Relevant Links
1. Itch.io Bandersnatch player [https://mehotkhan.github.io/BandersnatchInteractive/] Requires Google Chrome browser and the video file that is 5 hours and 12 minutes in length
2. Nohzdyve ZX Spectrum 48k game download [https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/34625/ZX-Spectrum/Nohzdyve] Spectrum Computing website Nohzdyve game entry webpage
