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 fucking 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”
LEFT: Stefan
increasingly feels like
he’s being controlled
by someone. And,
well, he is.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
I took a look at Twine and I
thought, ‘Fuck me, that looks
complicated!’ I did a bit of HTML in
the late ’90s, so it was kind of
familiar, but I still didn’t want to
learn it. I’m 47 years old! 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