A game from 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' is playable now
If Black Mirror: Bandersnatch wasn't unsettling or meta enough for you, the show's team snuck in another layer of gameplay: an actual Tuckersoft Games website. You can peruse the company's history (which you'll be familiar with if you watched Bandersnatch) and explore its game titles – all of which reference other Black Mirror episodes.
Perhaps the sneakiest goody on the site is that you can actually play Nohzdyve, the game Colin (Will Poulter) is working on. But there's a significant catch.
The .tap file containing the game can only be played by downloading a ZS Spectrum Emulator – a program that mimics the OS of a personal computer from the 1980s' Bandersnatch era. Fuse, Qaop, or Speccy are some potential emulators, but they only work on certain computers or operating systems (one of the only Mac-compatible downloads I found wouldn't open because it was from an unidentified developer).
The rest of the Tuckersoft website is worth exploring for its fun nods to Black Mirror lore. There's an ad from founder Mohan Tucker (Asim Choudhry) – probably the ad young Stefan responded to, which led him into this whole Bandersnatch mess.
The Bandersnatch page explains the game as simply as it can, with a few images we saw on Stefan's computer and a creepy cartoon of Pax, the Thief of Destiny.
Other than Bandersnatch and Nohzdyve, the only other game featured in the sidebar is Metl Hedd, a reference to the Black Mirror episode "Metalhead." Like Bandersnatch and a few others, this page contains a hyperlinked warning reading, "The people, places and actions depicted in this game are based on true events."
The text links out to the "Metalhead" Netflix page.
At the bottom, you'll see another Easter egg: A link to rateme.social, an app that lets you rate your friends or learn your own rating a la "Nosedive." If you plug in a handle, you can get an arbitrary (we hope) rating, and hopefully not stress too much about it.
The remaining games' descriptions can only be accessed through the History tab, where you'll find Roachbusters ("Men Against Fire"), Terror on Rannoch B ("Men Against Fire"/"White Bear"/"U.S.S. Callister"), Rolling Road ("Fifteen Million Credits"), Pig in a Poke ("The National Anthem"), Valdack's Revenge ("U.S.S. Callister"), and White Bear ("White Bear").
And on the Roachbusters page, another chilling ad: Coach, the dating app simulation found in "Hang the D.J." We've tried that one.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is now streaming on Netflix.
Topics Black Mirror
Proma Khosla is a Senior Entertainment Reporter writing about all things TV, from ranking Bridgerton crushes to composer interviews and leading Mashable's stateside coverage of Bollywood and South Asian representation. You might also catch her hosting video explainers or on Mashable's TikTok and Reels, or tweeting silly thoughts from @promawhatup.
