2001’s Black & White is finally playable again (kind of)

For many years, Peter Molyneux’s eccentric god game Black & White, released in 2001, has quite literally been unplayable. While there are workarounds to play the game on modern systems, the now-ancient game engine is simply unsupported by modern hardware and won’t run natively, meaning if anyone wanted to build anything off the existing engine, they couldn’t. However, after five years of hard work, a dedicated team of 15 developers has finally resurrected a version of the engine that works on desktops made after 2008.

Dubbed Openblack, this open-source engine recently reached its version 0.1.0 milestone — meaning that while it works, it’s far from user-friendly and bears a closer resemblance to a map editor than a finished game. The engine also requires an installation of the original game and its subsequent patches to run properly, a process that took me several hours to accomplish. Once you get Openblack running, you can explore the different islands from the original game and use menus to spawn in different structures and creatures, but not much else.

In case you never had the opportunity to experience Black & White, it plays like a town management game with some morality-based choices thrown in. For example, the game starts off by presenting you with the option to save a drowning child with your disembodied hand by plucking them out of the water… or throwing the grieving mother into the drink as well. This inspires a nearby town of villagers to worship you as a helpful or vengeful entity, and their prayers would enable you to cast different miracles, like creating water or casting fireballs. Think along the lines of Cult of the Lamb without the dungeon-crawling, and you get the gist.

Eventually, you would adopt a massive anthropomorphic animal that served as your avatar in the game world. A cross between a kaiju and a Tamagotchi, the animal would slowly learn new skills by observing your good and bad habits. Over time, the animal would grow and eventually adopt a unique appearance based on its benevolent or wrathful behaviors, treating your worshippers and rivals accordingly.

The reason anyone cares about playing a weird game that’s currently old enough to drink is a question of game conservation. Even with platforms like GOG, which made its name emulating retro titles that typically required some literacy with programs like DosBox to get running, when a game is either too difficult to emulate on modern hardware or not popular enough to warrant the effort, that game has the potential to disappear forever. While developers like Nightdive Studios engage in labors of love by remastering older titles to make them more palatable for modern audiences, often those games (like the excellent System Shock remake) aren’t representative of how the game played in its original state.

Unfortunately, without the aid of the original developers or committed efforts from a community like the Openblack team taking up the mantle, an increasing number of important titles will likely become lost to history. If you want to play Black & White now, sites like My Abandonware will allow you to download a copy of the original disc image, which you can mount and install with a program like Daemon Tools Lite. Afterward, you’ll need to install a series of patches available from bwgame.net, but you should be able to play the original game in all of its chunky, awkward glory.

While I don’t think that Peter Molyneux anticipated that people would want to play Black & White 23 years after its original release, the announcement of his next divinity simulator, Masters of Albion (which is currently in development with 22Cans) might be why Black & White has come back into gamer consciousness. Albion’s disembodied hand cursor, subtle town management, and gesture-based spellcasting have evidently drawn some inspiration from his 2001 title, and with the newfound ability to take a walk around Black & White, developers can once again have the opportunity to learn from that field of work, weird as it may be.