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

For years, Peter Molyneux’s eccentric god play Black & Whitereleased in 2001, is literally unplayable. While there are workarounds to play the game on modern systems, the now-ancient game engine simply isn’t supported by modern hardware and won’t run natively, meaning that if someone wanted to build something from the existing engine, they couldn’t. However, after five years of hard work, a dedicated team of 15 developers have finally resurrected a version of the engine that works on desktops built after 2008.

This open-source engine, called Openblack, recently hit the version 0.1.0 milestone — meaning it works, but it’s far from user-friendly and looks more like a map editor than a finished game. The engine also requires an installation of the original game and subsequent patches in order to work properly, a process that took me several hours. Once you’ve got Openblack up and running, you can explore the various islands from the original game and use menus to spawn in various structures and creatures, but not much else.

In case you never had the chance to experience this Black & Whiteit plays like a city management game with some moral choices thrown in. For example, the game starts with the option to save a drowning child with your disembodied hand by plucking them from the water… or tossing the grieving mother into the water as well. This inspires a nearby villager to worship you as a helpful or vengeful entity, and their prayers supposedly allow you to perform various miracles, such as creating water or throwing fireballs. Think Cult of the Lamb without the dungeon crawling, and you get the gist.

Eventually, you would adopt a giant anthropomorphic animal that would serve 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 take on a unique appearance based on its benevolent or angry behavior, treating your suitors and rivals accordingly.

The reason someone would care about playing a weird game that’s now old enough to drink is a matter of game preservation. Even with platforms like GOG, which made its name emulating retro titles that typically required some literacy with programs like DosBox to run, a game that’s either too difficult to emulate on modern hardware or not popular enough to warrant the effort can disappear forever. While developers like Nightdive Studios engage in a labor of love by remastering older titles to make them more palatable to a modern audience, those games (like the excellent System shock (remake) are not representative of how the game played in its original state.

Sadly, without the help of the original developers or the dedicated efforts of a community like the Openblack team taking up the mantle, an increasing number of important titles will likely be lost to history. If you want to play Black & White Now, sites like My Abandonware will let you download a copy of the original disk image, which you can mount and install with a program like Daemon Tools Lite. After that, 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 its chunky, clunky glory.

Although I don’t think Peter Molyneux expected people to want to play this Black & White 23 years after the original release, the announcement of his next divinity simulator, Masters of Albion (currently in development with 22Cans) could be the reason Black & White has returned to the consciousness of gamers. AlbionThe disembodied hand cursor, subtle city management, and gesture-based spells are clearly inspired by its 2001 title, and with the new ability to take a walk Black & Whitedevelopers can once again be given the opportunity to learn from that field, as strange as it may sound.