In Black & White the player is a god with no body, only a giant hand, and no power except what the people believe. Villagers on the island of Eden pray, the prayers fuel miracles, and how the god earns that worship, by kindness or by terror, changes the god’s temple, the land and the giant animal that acts for the player in the world. The creature was the point. It watched what the player did, copied it, and learned right from wrong from being stroked or slapped. Peter Molyneux had promised that his new studio’s first game would be the most important of his career. When it finally arrived, after more than three years, Edge compared the wait with John Romero’s Daikatana, and then added: “The key difference between the two products is that Black & White delivers. And it delivers in spades.”
Fast facts
- Developer: Lionhead Studios, Guildford.
- Publisher: Electronic Arts.
- Designer: Peter Molyneux; creature artificial intelligence by a team including Richard Evans.
- Released: PC, spring 2001 (6 April in Britain, at £35); Macintosh version by Feral Interactive, early 2002.
- Reviews: Edge 9/10; PC Zone 95%; PC Gamer 94%.
- Sales: more than two million copies.
- Expansion: Creature Isle (2002). Sequel: Black & White 2 (2005).
A god with a hand
The player arrives in Eden when a young couple, whose son is about to be eaten by sharks, pray for help. Save the child, and they and their neighbours worship the new god. Worship gives the god power, but only within the boundary of the believers’ land. Outside it, as Computer Gaming World’s Charles Ardai put it, “you can’t so much as stir up dust on the ground”. Rival gods want the same villages, so the game becomes a contest of conversion, by miracles and displays of strength or by fear.
Everything is done with the hand. It grabs the land to move the view, picks up trees and boulders and throws them, and casts miracles when the player draws a shape with the mouse. Edge counted “mouse-gestured miracle casting” among the skills that took real practice, and found the mouse-controlled camera awkward enough that it switched to the keyboard. Villagers can be thrown into the temple’s sacrifice crucible for a quick boost of power. Ardai found the “invisible” interface both the game’s best idea and its main weakness: “Use the mouse and you find the screen rotating when you meant to move laterally.”
Morality runs through all of it. Edge noted that villagers could be won over “with acts of kindness … or pure showmanship”. Do enough evil, Ardai wrote, and “your hand turns into a demon’s claw ordering a pointy-toothed monster that moves about a blood-red land populated by terrified slaves”; do enough good and the creature “begins to glow with golden light”.
The creature
Early in the game the player chooses a creature: an ape, a cow or a tiger. Ardai found the cow docile, the tiger aggressive and the ape a good mimic. Edge counted some 16 species in all, and other species can be won through side quests.
The creature learns by watching and by being rewarded or punished. There is no “good boy” button. The player strokes its tummy or under its chin, or slaps it across the face. Three leashes speed up training, but the creature also wanders off and learns on its own, from the villagers as well as from the player. A creature that has seen the god work a miracle a few times may start doing it unprompted. Edge listed what could be taught: “miracles, man-management skills, toilet and dietary habits”, and prejudices and preferences too, until the creature’s personality “invariably reflects your own”. When two creatures meet, an arena appears and a fighting game breaks out.
In 1998, with the game two years from release, Edge described it as “Populous meets Pokemon” and named Richard Evans, Mark Webley and Jonty Barnes among the people building the creature. It also reported that the creature’s appearance and the whole world would change to match the player’s behaviour.
Reception
The game arrived after a long run of praise. Computer Gaming World had called it “one of the five games that will change gaming forever”, and the game’s official website quoted the line. Ardai, reviewing it for the same magazine, thought it was everything its supporters had claimed, “original, engrossing, moving, memorable, and provocative”, but doubted that anyone could copy it the way Doom had been copied. It would change individual players, he wrote, not gaming. Edge gave it nine out of ten and called it “a colossal achievement”. Its complaints were the camera, a bewildering first few hours and “spartan” multiplayer and skirmish modes. PC Zone gave it 95%. One PC Zone reader wrote in to ask who could run it, if the minimum specification really was the Pentium III 650 the magazine had quoted.
The novelties went beyond the creature. Villagers worked out their own routines, took tea breaks, fell in love and mourned the dead. The game could download weather, and it could name villagers from the player’s Outlook contact list.
Later
An expansion, Creature Isle, followed in 2002, and Feral Interactive’s Macintosh version came out in early 2002. Lionhead made Black & White 2 for Electronic Arts in 2005. By 2010, Edge reported, the first game had sold more than two million copies. Microsoft bought Lionhead in 2006 and closed it in 2016; the Lionhead entry tells that story.
Sources
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998, pp. 53–56: preview (“Populous meets Pokemon”; Richard Evans, Mark Webley and Jonty Barnes on the creature; creature and world changing with the player’s behaviour).
- Edge issue 96, April 2001, pp. 70–71: review, nine out of ten (the Daikatana comparison, “mouse-gestured miracle casting”, the camera, the sacrifice crucible, the three starting creatures and 16 species, the three leashes, the creature fights, the villagers, the e-mail and weather features, “spartan” multiplayer).
- PC Zone issue 101, April 2001: readers’ letters (the 95% score, the Pentium III 650 minimum specification, “roughly three years in the making”).
- PC Zone issue 102, May 2001: HMV advertisement (“Released 6th April”; “95% PC Zone March 2001”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 203, June 2001: review by Charles Ardai (the opening with the sharks, worship and the limits of the god’s power, the cow, ape and tiger, stroking and slapping, the leashes, the “invisible” interface, the good and evil appearances, “one of the five games that will change gaming forever”, quoted on the game’s official website).
- PC Gamer issue 96, May 2001: Black & White, 94%.
- Computer Gaming World issue 210, January 2002, p. 44: Creature Isle hands-on.
- Macworld (UK), March 2004, p. 18: Feral Interactive’s David Stephen on piracy “upon the release of Black & White in early 2002”.
- Edge issue 216, July 2010: Black & White “sold more than two million copies”.