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The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Plaything – how Black Mirror took on its scariest ever subject: a 1990s PC games magazine
Out of all the episodes in the excellent seventh season of Black Mirror, it's Plaything that sticks out to me and I suspect to anyone else who played video games in the 1990s. It's the story of socially awkward freelance games journalist, Cameron Walker, who steals the code to a new virtual pet sim named Thronglets from the developer he's meant to be interviewing. When he gets the game home, he realises the cute, intelligent little critters he's caring for on the screen have a darker ambition than simply to perform for his amusement – cue nightmarish exploration of AI and our complicity in its rise. The episode is interesting to me because … well, I was a socially awkward games journalist in the mid-1990s. But more importantly, so was Charlie Brooker. He began his writing career penning satirical features and blistering reviews for PC Zone magazine, one of the two permanently warring PC mags of the era (I shared an office with the other, PC Gamer). In Plaything, it's PC Zone that Cameron Walker writes for, and there are several scenes taking place in its office, which in the programme is depicted as a reasonably grownup office space with tidy computer workstations and huge windows. I do not think the production design team got this vision from Brooker. 'Zone had far less of the corporate workplace feel than the episode showed, and much more of a kids in the basement, youth club-cum-nightclub vibe to it,' says Paul Presley, who worked on PC Zone at the time. 'It was a handful of messy, cluttered desks stuck in a windowless basement office round the back of Oxford Street (later Tottenham Court Road). We'd have killed for floor-to-ceiling windows! Editorial, art and production were all on top of each other, music blasting from the office stereo, usually furnished by the neighbouring Metal Hammer magazine. Desks were personal spaces, overflowing with paper, mags, trinkets, swag and tons and tons of CDs.' In the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I also contacted another PC Zone alumnus Richie Shoemaker for his recollections. 'Although there were windows along one side, they were below street level and smeared with London grime,' he says. 'The sills were piled high with dusty magazines, broken joysticks and likely-empty game boxes. It was perpetual night for the best part of eight years down there.' The episode was more accurate on the games themselves – the first scene in the office shows Cam playing Doom, when the editor comes over, shows him the front cover of the latest issue of the mag with System Shock on the cover, then asks Cameron if he's finished his review of Bullfrog's classic adventure game Magic Carpet. '[Plaything] is good on the timelines,' says Shoemaker. 'Playing Doom in the office was of course standard – although when I joined the team Quake was the lunchtime and afterwork deathmatch of choice. The Magic Carpet review did appear in the issue after System Shock (which was actually Charlie's first cover review), but it got 96%, not 93% and was written by launch editor Paul Lakin – who went on to work at the Foreign Office.' He also reckons the episode's grizzled old editor might have been inspired by then deputy editor, Chris Anderson, who according to Shoemaker was 'quite a vampiric character who seemed to exist on a diet of cigarettes and Ultima Online.' Most fascinating to me though is the inspirational origin of the Thronglets virtual pet game. Most reviewers have been referencing Tamagotchi, the keychain pet toy that took the world by storm int the late 90s. Brooker himself has referenced it in an interview. However, a much more likely candidate was the 1996 title Creatures, in which players cared for generations of cuddly-looking critters. Although it looked like a cutesy pet game it was in fact a highly sophisticated artificial life experiment, created by the distinctly sci-fi-sounding CyberLife Technology. Players needed to try to establish breeding populations of the creatures – called norns – but your control over them was limited as they were coded with advanced neural networks and had functioning internal bodily systems regulating their behaviours and physical abilities. CyberLife made a big deal of the complexity and experimental nature of the game: the box came with a warning sticker stating 'Digital DNA Enclosed' and the blurb on the back cautioned players that they would be unleashing the world's first artificial life-science experiment – which is exactly what Plaything is about. Creatures creator Steve Grand bears similarities to the Plaything (and Bandersnatch) coder Colin Ritman. He was a programmer who got tired of conventional games and wanted to try something extremely new. He went on to write a book about Creatures and its development, Creation: Life and How to Make It, and later became an internationally renowned roboticist, famously developing a robot orangutan. Surely the most Black Mirror career trajectory ever. In 2011, he started work on a spiritual follow-up to Creatures named Grandroids, which like Thronglets was about developing a race of intelligent AI aliens – Grand launched a Kickstarter for it in 2016. The project has yet to surface although Grand has a new website for it under the name Phantasia. All very intriguing. This is one of the things I love about Black Mirror, and indeed the use of technology and video games in conventional drama: this is an arcane world full of eccentric people no one outside the industry has heard of, yet the toys they make have massive ramifications. Personally, I wanted to see a lot more of the PC Zone as imagined by the programme, but I understand that the sinister Thronglets were the real focus. Maybe one day there will be a full Silicon Valley-style drama series about the games industry in the 1990s – it was a hell of a time. For now, it's interesting to see the world both Brooker and I inhabited being used as the venue for dystopian fiction – even if they really did get it completely wrong about those windows.
Telegraph
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Black Mirror, season 7, review: Charlie Brooker is back on five-star form
'It's like an episode of Black Mirror ' is the common refrain whenever we catch a whiff of something vaguely technologically dystopian. Charlie Brooker, the man behind the enormously successful sci-fi anthology series (once of Channel 4, now on Netflix), has clearly heard this one too many times and has decided to interpret it as a provocation. You want an episode of Black Mirror? I'll give you an episode of Black Mirror. In truth, Brooker has moved away from the 'iPhones but bad' blueprint of the early years, but this thrilling seventh series opens with an episode so achingly ' Black Mirror ' that it could have been created by an (exceptionally sophisticated) AI programme. Common People has every hallmark – a sweet, middle-class couple (in this case Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd) who want the simple things in life, a near future where things have gone slightly awry and a life-changing piece of technology that is made accessible to all before revealing itself to have some serious caveats. It's iPhones but bad, essentially. And it's brilliant. What starts out as a neat slice of Twilight Zone sci-fi – Jones's Amanda has her life saved by some experimental brain tech – turns into a thumping critique of the US healthcare system and our increasingly deadening subscription culture, as well as a meditation on love and loss. You might be able to come up with a hundred 'Black Mirror ideas' in the pub, but Brooker can execute them with panache, heart and soul – and Common People isn't close to being the best episode of the series. There's a sense that Brooker has created these episodes with the handbrake off, allowing himself not one but two spin-offs. The much anticipated USS Callister: Into Infinity is, in truth, an indulgence (and a 90-minute one at that), but an enormously satisfying one, and Plaything, while not a straight sequel, exists in the same universe as interactive episode Bandersnatch. Brooker has even inserted 'himself' into it, in the shape of an early Nineties video-game journalist working for PC Zone. A hallmark of this refreshingly analogue series is its tangible love for physical, retro technology – floppy disks and all. Yet, for all that he's known as a professional misanthrope, Brooker has surpassed himself with two beautiful love stories – both, to my mind, superior to the slightly overrated San Junipero. Eulogy is a 21st-century Krapp's Last Tape, with Paul Giamatti magnificent as a man forced to confront his past via a series of digitally enhanced old photographs. Hotel Reverie, meanwhile, cements Brooker's reputation as TV's Alan Ayckbourn, able to marry high concepts with emotional truth. In it, Issa Rae stars as a modern-day Hollywood star who is digitally implanted into a Casablanca-esque Golden Age movie, where she takes the lead role opposite Emma Corrin's blushing 1940s beauty. It shares DNA with the recent Westworld – indeed most of this series is preoccupied with whether androids dream of electric sheep – but more than that it brings to mind The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The direction, by Haolu Wang, is sensational. If the previous two series felt curiously flat, this one fizzes with invention, humour and love, and finds the joy in the darkest of corners. Brooker's back. Series 7 of Black Mirror is on Netflix now
