'Bandersnatch': The Works That Inspired the 'Black Mirror' Interactive Feature (2019)

Summary

Black Mirror‘s interactive sci-fi film Bandersnatch is a project literally decades in the making. Though the creative team has spoken about how the technology and narrative that brought the mind-bending experience to life has been in the works for around two years, the stories, projects and cultural touchstones that shaped it go back almost a century and a half. It’s these kind of influences, intricacies and references that have made Black Mirror: Bandersnatch as a whole such a dense and re-watchable experience, one that’s almost as exciting to pick apart and explore as it is to watch the show itself. Bandersnatch takes its name from a terrifying creature first introduced in a nonsense rhyme from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Alice finds herself in an inverted version of reality and discovers a mysterious poem called “The Jabberwocky” that can only be deciphered once she holds it up to a mirror: Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun. The frumious Bandersnatch! Of course, the core of Bandersnatch is focused on the burgeoning gaming industry of the 1980s. Although the title comes from a moment in a classic novel which seems to be cherry-picked by Brooker to tie into the conceptual drive of his series, Bandersnatch was actually the title of a real video game that, despite being highly anticipated, was never released by the company that made it. In 1982, despite being only a few months old, Liverpool-based Imagine Software was riding high on the release of four popular games, including the massively successful Arcadia for the ZX Spectrum. The company’s next big play was focused on the idea of “Megagames,” which would retail for more than three times the price of an average game and focus on specialized packaging, an additional piece of hardware for your console, and around 30 extra gifts which were never really explained. (A post-credits Easter egg in Brooker’s B...