GAMING SPECIAL
supplying equipment or consulting,” says Jason, reeling off a list of some of the huge Hollywood films that items from the collection have recently made star turns in. When Steven Spielberg set about making Ernest Cline’s epic dystopian Ready Player One into a blockbuster movie, it was the Centre for Computing History that was sought out to provide era-accurate tech, and the same for Charlie Brooker’s recent ‘choose your own adventure’ Netflix smash Black Mirror: Bandersnatch . “That was huge – fun, but hard,” recalls Jason. “It’s nice doing it for Netflix, because it has a lot of money, so a lot of these things are like, ‘Oh well we’re on a budget’ – but with this, within reason, there wasn’t a budget and it was like ‘Just make this flipping perfect’ – and we did, it took months and months.” Jason and his team supplied and set up all of the tech for the show’s fictional game studio Tuckersoft, taking over an entire floor of the No 1 Croydon building and filling it with retro computers and gadgets. “I built all the computers there and everything. Every computer; everything that had a plug on it was me!” he laughs. “Charlie Brooker loves the techy stuff to death, and he mentioned a few things that he really wanted to see in there, like a Kempston joystick and an original Spectrum… When it came to the hero sets, every detail was in it, because We do a lot of work with the TV and film industry, either supplying equipment or consulting"
centre believe it’s a story that deserves to be told. As well as looking back on our digital history, Jason stresses that the centre has an important role to fulfil in educating future generations about the impact – and potential dangers – of the technology that now infiltrates every aspect of our lives. “In terms of the area we concentrate on, it’s really the personal computer evolution. There were machines way before the mid-70s, big machines that filled entire rooms, but they didn’t touch upon people’s lives that much… Those computers weren’t powerful, so the things that you could make them do didn’t have much impact. Now we have computers that dominate our lives. The things we can make them do need to be thought about,” he explains. “It’s now not just about ‘can we?’, it’s about ‘should we?’ It’s a major issue. We get school groups in and we talk about it; there are implications now. It’s very much about the social impact of it all. “These big companies, they know everything about you. What does that mean? It can get really deep, and we don’t want to scare anyone,” he adds. “But we’ve seen a few things go a bit wrong with the elections and things like that and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it’s good just to be aware of it, for kids to understand that, actually, there is a side to this that we’ve probably already messed up a little bit, and that they’re going to need to unpick this.” HOLLYWOOD CALLS When a collection reaches the scale and prestige of CCH’s, it naturally attracts interest – sometimes from unexpected quarters. “We do a lot of work with the TV and film industry, either
IMAGES Stills from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive
Netflix film the CCH provided props for
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ISSUE 06
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