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Netflix has announced it will be bringing an interactive episode of Black Mirror to the streaming platform, thus marrying together the worlds of idly watching people say things and jabbing buttons to make stuff happen.
The next series of the anthology show, set to arrive December, will be pretty standard fare – or as standard as it can be where Black Mirror is concerned – but for one episode. Said episode, reports Bloomberg, will see viewers able to choose their own storylines as they progress, modifying things on the go and resulting in a markedly different episode to that experienced by many others.
The push into interactive storytelling is early days for Netflix, but it isn’t totally new – a kids animated program, Puss in Book, allowed viewers to choose how the story unfurled. Meanwhile the streaming giant is still making its way through the world of video games, even if Telltale is unlikely to be helping out much any more.
Interactive movies have a long and fraught relationship with the games industry, and those of us who lived through the ‘hey it’s the future, better put video in it!’ early era of the CD-ROM might well have flashbacks to a… unique, let’s say, time for gaming.
But with creator Charlie ‘I like video games’ Brooker behind it, Black Mirror’s interactive episode could well harness all that was good about those early days interactive movies, while simultaneously avoiding the trappings of something like Seventh Guest.
Or maybe he’ll just remake Night Trap, who knows?
