The first true Black Mirror game, Thronglets, is out today on Netflix. And it could represent the next phase of the streaming giant’s push into games.
Thronglets seems to show that there’s now much tighter collaboration between the streaming giant’s TV and gaming teams. It is developed by Netflix-owned Oxenfree creator Night School Studio, and is the centrepiece of the Plaything episode in the new Black Mirror season, which is also live today.
Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker says he has been involved in the game’s development from the outset. Thronglets riffs on The Sims, Creatures, Theme Park, Tamagotchis and ‘90s PC gaming in general, says Brooker, who also encouraged Night School to layer its own ideas into the game. It’s not just a spin-off, he says.
Brooker talked about the game at Netflix’s GDC press event last month, in which new games president Alain Tascan outlined again that it is now focusing on kids, mainstream, narrative and party games.
Later, we spoke with Tascan some more and he told us Netflix is eyeing up more social game experiences, is still in the market to buy studios and insisted it has the “grit and resilience” to stick with games long-term – unlike other entertainment and tech firms.
The third element of the press event was embargoed until now. Appearing via video conference, Brooker also spoke about Thronglets, working with Night School and how the game drives the action in the Plaything episode of his new Black Mirror series.
He started by explaining that Night School started work on the game once the Plaything script was written and the episode was in pre-production. Night School founder and studio director Sean Krankel also explained that the game and TV teams were swapping notes daily as both projects developed. Thronglets took about a year and a half to make from start to finish, Krankel said.
(Krankel later revealed he’d pitched Brooker on another game idea six months before the Black Mirror/Thronglets collab was set in motion, but Brooker wasn’t into it…)
“We started taking cues for the look of the game [in the episode] from the games team,” Brooker said. “So actually, collaborating on the game improved the look and the feel of the game in the episode itself, and hopefully vice versa.”
“It was also important to me, as a viewer of TV shows who plays games a lot, to make sure that if we’re showing 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…it needs to feel real and of its time.”
“I had a notion in my head of what the game would look like,” continued Brooker. “It was partly based on some of my experiences as a game journalist, and I always knew it was going to be somewhere in between Sim City and The Sims, and that it was a sort of riff on the things people do to The Sims, and would also have an AI component to it.”
Brooker said it was refreshing to talk to the games team and reference the likes of Vampire Survivors, WarioWare and Return of the Obra Dinn during its production. Any game based on his series had to retain the shock value that Black Mirror is known for, he said.
“The thing about Black Mirror is we can’t just do a sort of standard game, right?” he continued. “It has to have some element to it that’s possibly unexpected or it looks like it’s going one way and then it goes another. There was the juxtaposition of making it look as cute as possible and having quite disturbing and dark things happen in it.”
Netflix played to the crowd well at its GDC event. This was, after all, a room full of games media listening to Brooker, a former games journalist, talking about a TV show starring…a games journalist. But will Thronglets actually appeal to those outside of that particular bubble?
“I’m on tenterhooks waiting to see how people will react when they watch the episode and then realise they can get the game,” said Brooker. “I can’t work out if that’s great advertising for the game or a terrible warning…”
Based on the pedigree of the developer Night School, and how well the studio’s own brand of spooky, twisty narrative games fits into the world of Black Mirror, it already feels like a better fit than Netflix’s Fall Guys-like Squid Game tie-in. That game may have brought in big download numbers, but it also attracted some brutal reviews.
Indeed, Brooker was keen to portray Thronglets as more than a box-ticking exercise – adding that Night School has been allowed to make it “a very different experience” to what viewers will see in the TV episode.
“Quite early on I said [to Night School]: ‘don’t worry too much about just replicating what it is in the script’…you want more surprises and you want more of the ideas that [Night School] were coming out with.”
“That was more exciting to me, that the game does something somewhat different…it’s not just a sort of spin-off. It’s hopefully a whole experience in its own right.”
