Unlike most episodes of “ Black Mirror,” “Bandersnatch” is not a tale about the devastating potential of technology. Thakur bids to publish Butler’s game, which is called Bandersnatch-a reference to a real game of the era that famously never came out-and offers Butler help to finish the game and a luxurious advertising campaign to promote it.īut the decision to take up Thakur’s offer rests not with Butler but with you, the viewer.
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There he meets one of his heroes, the game designer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), who personifies the high-flying, bespectacled teen auteur Butler dreams of becoming.
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As a means of escape, he considers selling the game, and takes an unfinished version to a publishing house run by the grinningly opportunistic Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry). Butler works from his aromatic bedroom, in a house he still shares with his father. This historical moment provides the setting for “Bandersnatch,” a new episode of the writer Charlie Brooker’s “ Black Mirror.” The episode, which débuted on Netflix last week, follows Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), a nervy young programmer who, after finding a choose-your-own-adventure-style fantasy novel that belonged to his late mother, begins adapting it into a video game. Like pop stars, they were often only slightly older than their fans, and their work was followed with cultish obsession. Those who managed to place their games into high-street retailers, such as WHSmith, became rich.
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Before the industrialization of video games-the great American software factories and their nameless workers-these teens staged a quiet revolution from their bedrooms, designing games on home microprocessors.
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He described the thrill as being “as close to sexual satisfaction as you could possibly get.” The feeling was shared, seemingly, by many youths in the Britain of the early nineteen-eighties, when there was little economic opportunity for the working class. When he was a young man, the English video-game designer Peter Molyneux programmed a pixel to slide across the screen of his Acorn Atom computer.