INTERVIEW
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 black widescreen bars lift up subtly and your
choices appear, that all happens via the UI. And 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 it on a games console or a fairly
up-to-date TV, and your internet connection is good,
you’ll get no gap at all.
We put a lot of thought into designing the interface. At
first I wanted the choices to just 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 the 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 version and the vibration was way too
high, so I said, as a reference, go away and play Forza
Horizon 4 and when you drive over some leaves, that’s the
level of intensity we want. That was some pretty 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.TOP: Stefan meets
with his psychiatrist,
Dr.Haynes,andyou
choose what to say
to her.LEFT: The ’80s
setting is lovingly
realised, down to that
retro Wimpy logo.