A Black Mirror (2011) interactive film, in which the viewer chooses the plot direction multiple times. Although the listed running time is 90 minutes, this is approximate, depending how long the viewer decides to keep watching: most people can finish the story in one sitting of around 40 minutes, but this can be extended with 'do-overs', where an option is given to return to an earlier point in the story and make another choice. About 2.5 hours of footage divided into 250 segments was shot for the episode, with over a trillion unique permutations of the story (though many of those will be very similar). The total amount of footage included to make all of the film's possible variations work is 5 hours 12 minutes 13 seconds, as revealed by the film's BBFC classification.
Although Colin has an interesting theory for the origin of the name Pac Man, the game was originally called Puck Man. This name was revised when the makers realized that the side of the arcade machine could easily be vandalized to turn "Puck Man" to "Fuck Man".
The actor portraying Jerome F. Davies is Jeff Minter, who himself is actually a famous 8-bit video game designer and programmer who created several successful games in the 1980s for the ZX Spectrum (among others), which is a computer prominently featured in the movie.
The 'fax' sounds you hear at the end of Bandersnatch on Stefan's headphone translates to a QR code. That leads you to a website where you will find one of the games shown in the movie. In fact, these sounds are the actual loading tones of a ZX Spectrum program. The sequence of a carrier tone followed by a data tone is repeated twice; the first to load the BASIC program, the second to load the machine code to display the QR code.
Bandersnatch was a real-life video game project that was being developed by Imagine Software in the 1980s. It was one of two "Megagames" that they proposed to launch - Bandersnatch was aimed for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer whilst Psyclapse was due to be launched on the Commodore 64. Bandersnatch in particular was claimed to be the most innovative and advanced home computer title ever created, bringing new levels of interaction to the platform. However, the game got canceled in the wake of Imagine's bankruptcy, although the rights were eventually obtained by Psygnosis Ltd., and several of its concept finally made their way into their 1985 game 'Brataccas'. With its interactivity and theme, this episode can be seen as a 'real world' version of what Imagine were trying to create in 1984.