The Unbearable Stress of Watching Bandersnatch with Family
Black Mirror’s latest revives classic 1990s CD-ROM interactive movie technology
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Netflix’s first choose-your own adventure film for adults, is set in 1984, the early days of video gaming. The setting provides the through-the-looking glass cyber tale a useful, nostalgic tone. However, its ancestral roots more accurately trace back to the mid-1990s and the heyday of CD-ROM gaming, when game developers and Hollywood teamed up to deliver hundreds of Interactive Movies.
As I watched one version of the twisted cyber-tale with my family, I was reminded of games like Sony Imagesoft’s Johnny Mnemonic, an interactive CD-ROM game based on a William Gibson story, which would become a Keanu Reeves movie later that same year. “It’s essentially a movie filmed as a computer game,” wrote PC Magazine of the CD-ROM in 1995 when it selected Johnny Mnemonic as one of the Top CD-ROMs of the year (I managed the story). The interactive and filmed sequences were seamlessly woven together, however, wrote PC Magazine, “the video window changes only slightly to indicate that the player is faced with a ‘window of opportunity.” In other words, the CD-ROM presented the player with choices.
