Black Mirror’s new season features a playable nightmare: Thronglets comes to mobile
- Netflix releases a companion game alongside the new season of Black Mirror
- Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, a former games journalist, drew upon his experience reviewing games in the 1990s
- The “Playthings” episode marks a return to the Bandersnatch universe, and the game – included with your Netflix subscription – comes from fictional publisher Tuckersoft
The new season of Black Mirror starts today on Netflix. And there’s a real treat for gamers in episode four. It’s a return to the universe of Bandersnatch (the hit interactive episode from 2018), with an accompanying mobile game.
The episode is called Playthings. Set in 1994, it sees the maverick game creator Colin Ritman return to development with Thronglets, an “artificial life simulator”. It calls to mind Lemmings, Creatures, Tamagotchi and other 1990s fads.
There’s more than a whiff of truth here as creator and writer Charlie Brooker began his media journey as a writer for PC Zone. The magazine, which closed in 2010, makes a cameo appearance in “Playthings”, with the episode’s central character being a nervous young writer tasked with previewing Thronglets. Charlie Brooker himself wrote about Creatures back in the day.
“I used to be a games journalist in the 1990s,” confirmed the writer when he spoke at the Netflix event during GDC. “A lot of the stories I’ve written have drawn on games for inspiration. It’s often lurking in the back of my mind.”
From games journalist to TV creator
Thinking of how formative games were for him, he continues: “One of the reasons I wanted to get into television was because I had a memory of seeing Space Invaders and very early Atari games, and being mesmerised by the notion that this was TV (which I loved) but you control what was happening! It felt like a magic trick to me. And so [games] was sort of the thing that got me into television.”
Creatures was a series created by roboticist Steve Grand, in which you help digital lifeforms explore and learn, leading to unexpected gameplay emerging as you interact with the growing beings. Brooker was one of several journalists in the 1990s – including others who now work for Pocket Gamer’s parent company – who previewed this PC phenomenon at the time. Meanwhile, Tamagotchi was all the rage following its launch in 1996.
They’re digital pets you carry around on a keyring and attempt to keep happy and healthy, usually by periodically checking in to feed them. The Tamagotchi franchise has seen many re-releases and updates, most recently on mobile last year with Tamagotchi Adventure Kingdom. If you’ve played either of these games, you’ll get the vibe.
As with all Black Mirror episodes, things spiral towards the worst possible conclusion, and the game leads to chaos, madness and… well, you’ll have to tune in and see. It stars Peter Capaldi, Lewis Gribben, James Nelson Joyce and Michele Austin, with Will Poulter and Asim Chaudhry reprising their roles from 2018.
Black Mirror becomes reality
To accompany the new series, Netflix Games has released an actual version of Thronglets for mobile devices. Netflix publishes many mobile games – titles like Hades, Into The Breach and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are all ready to play on your mobile device – and all Netflix subscribers will be able to download the Thronglets game by logging onto the Netflix app.
“In pre-production, we started collaborating with the games team,” said Brooker. “We started taking cues for the look of the game [in the episode] from the games team. So actually, collaborating on the game improved the look and the feel of the game in the episode itself, and hopefully vice versa.”
Clearly, it was important for Brooker that the Thronglets game from Netflix had the correct 1990s feel. “It was important to me generally as a viewer of TV shows who plays games a lot,” he told the select San Francisco audience. “I wanted to make sure that if we show you a game in the episode, it has to feel like a real thing. Not just a game that’s been invented for a TV show, that you’re just going to see in the background.”
The game on your phone even appears to come from fictional retro brand Tuckersoft. Your task is to care for a Thronglet, which soon splits into two, which soon becomes four and so on, and they all need to be fed, cleaned and played with. Good luck keeping up. Don’t teach them any bad habits!
As the fictional developer, Ritman says in the show, “You hatch one, you’ll nurture and you’ll care for it until it replicates. One becomes two, two becomes four, and so on. The thronglets become a harmonic throng… You’ll come to appreciate the company of the throng over time. That code will evolve, rewrite itself in ways that even I can’t predict…“
The game has the visual style of top-down 16-bit classics like Lemmings. Your Thronglets start in a field, with drag-and-drop mechanics enabling you to give them apples or balls to play with. After a few minutes, you’ll need to clean them. Then you’ll be able to help them escape from the immediate field – pinch to zoom and you’ll see the world got a lot bigger. Just as well, because they’ll soon start to multiply. You can start to add a bathtub and other items. Is your phone glitching as they move around?
Netflix creates digital life
Given that AI has dominated the news cycle since ChatGPT hit browsers in 2022, the episode (and the game) is also a timely conversation about the role of artificial life, our responsibilities towards it, and the dangers it poses.
The official elevator pitch is: “This long-lost Tuckersoft game hasn’t seen the light of day since its cancellation in 1994… until now. It’s a Tamagotchi-gone-wrong that turns into a personality test for humankind.”
We’ve been playing it since that preview event in San Francisco in March, and nobody at Pocket Gamer has died – yet.
You can download Thronglets today from your Netflix app (subscription required) and dive in before watching Playthings, episode four of the new Black Mirror season. Remember, you are signing up to take care of a new life form… But also, you’re getting new insight into the Bandersnatch universe. As Brooker teased during our San Francisco preview: “There are things that happen in the game that you do not see happening in the episode. You get a different experience from the game than you do in the episode. It’s not just a spin-off. It’s hopefully a whole experience of its own.”
