You Can Play One Of The Games From 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' Now
Black Mirror is taking its interactive feature-length special to a whole other level. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is making headlines for its unique choose-your-own-adventure format, forcing its viewers to make choices that will send them hurtling down a different rabbit hole every time.
It's an experience not unlike a video game, which is fitting since the premise of Bandersnatch centers around a programmer attempting to adapt a fantasy novel into a game. With Black Mirror: Bandersnatch set in the '80s and chock-full by video game references, Netflix has upped the immersive experience by making available one of the games featured in the film — with a twist.
If you couldn't get enough of your movies turning into video games, Netflix is offering another chance to play a video game from the world of Black Mirror. The game Nohzdyve — a nod to the season 3 episode "Nosedive" — is introduced in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch as one of the games from a fictional game development studio, Tuckersoft. Netflix being Netflix, there's already a full-fledged Tuckersoft website, done up in the retro style of an '80s arcade screen mixed with a '90s website page, to align with the film's '80s setting.
Nohzdyve is described on Tuckersoft's site as:
You're falling fast through the sky! Collect eyeballs and avoid the buildings and other hazards. Perfection is key. This was truly a five star game by none other than Colin Ritman (played by Will Poulter).
In the film, Nohzdyve was developed for the ZX Spectrum, a personal computer that was released in Britain in the early 1980s. So the only way to play Nohzdyve in 2018 and experience the game the way Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker — who started his career as a video game journalist — envisioned is to download a ZX Spectrum emulator. The Verge notes that there are several emulators to choose from, including Fuse, Qaop, and Speccy.
This isn't the first time that Netflix has released a retro video game in conjunction with one of its series. Stranger Things received a 16-bit video game to also mirror its '80s setting. But Black Mirror is so far the only one to require an emulator.
You can play Nohzdyve here.