← Back to context

Comment by silisili

20 hours ago

> as they were hard to support?

X to doubt. The tech worked fine. The real issue is that nobody wants choose-your-own-adventure TV, which has been proven again and again.

10 comments

silisili

Reply
teekert  19 hours ago

My kid loved that interactive Bear Grylls stuff, still talks about it sometimes (what his wrong choices were etc.) Sometimes I think they kill this stuff before it get mainstream. Also, some way to control via the TV, or Chromecast may have made this more popular.

  • knallfrosch  18 hours ago

    I remember Bear Grills "You vs. Wild" as one of the most well-known interactive shows. It's strange it's never mentioned in articles about interactive Netflix features.

nbevans  19 hours ago

I see.

But surely Netflix could have setup 1 to 3 of the "best" variants of the Bandersnatch and let people watch those? Even a "directors cut" based on how the director chose the path, would suffice.

The content is entirely gone right now. Which is pretty tragic as it was excellent.

  • jsheard  18 hours ago

    > The content is entirely gone right now.

    It's officially gone, but you can acquire the raw video through other means and plug it into this open source reimplementation of the frontend: https://mehotkhan.github.io/BandersnatchInteractive/

    • Angostura  18 hours ago

      It's a pity Brooker didn't have some residual IP control so it could have been republished elsewhere. I honestly think it was a little masterpiece that deserved to be saved.

    • throwaway-38nmm  13 hours ago

      This is really exciting, but I'm having an immense amount of trouble finding the single 1080p-quality release that is listed as known to work.

      Edit: For that matter, I actually can't seem to find the 720p releases either.

      2 replies →

Nursie  18 hours ago

That was a standalone piece though, rather than some sort of trend. The choose-your-own nature of it was integral to the story and referential to the contemporary books which were CYO.

Your theory fits fine with “We’re not going to make a series like this or turn it into a genre”, but not so well with “we already made this thing and it was really popular, but we’ve decided to take it off the platform”