Black & White

Trivia

In 2001, Black & White won both the Gold- and Platinum-Awards from the German VUD (Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland - Entertainment Software Association Germany) for selling more then 100,000 units (Gold) and more then 200,000 units (Platinum) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. As the Gold-Award is not counted into the Platinum-Award, both awards total in between 300,000 and 700,000 units sold.

Black & White was named "most overrated game of all time" by GameSpy.com in 2003.

There was an interesting feature included with the game. If you registered your game at www.bwgame.com, the weather ingame would match the weather in your area.

Contributed by Santa (847) on Aug 16, 2006.

In a beta version, signing Peter Molyneux's name as a "gesture" immediately gives you the most powerful spell in the game. Molyneux included this feature to give him an advantage in multiplayer. It is not known whether this made it into the final version.

Black & White received a 95% rating from PC Gamer magazine (June 2001; reviewed by Li C. Kuo). It was the PC Gamer “Game of the Month” and was also honored as an “Editor’s Choice.”

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Mar 06, 2005.

If you ever wondered about that creepy female voice saying "Death" every once in a while, it means that someone in your village just died.

There's a patch that let's you eliminate that voice if it's too spooky for your taste.

Contributed by Indra Depari of 'da Clan Depari (13163) on Dec 15, 2003.

There are some funny references in the game as well. When you start the “boat-quest” to construct an ark (behind the wooden gates), you’ll hear some really annoying singing. Kill the middle on of the three singers and the others will go “Oh my God! You killed Kenneth!”, which is an obvious Southpark reference.

After constructing the ark, you’ll see two people reenact the famous Titanic scene as well.

Contributed by Sciere (118067) on Aug 19, 2003.

The famous Sailor Song was, in the english version, sung by the Lionhead-people... pretty impressive performance, I think... ;)

One of the most common bugs encountered with Black & White is the game freezing on the "Tip of the Day" level loading screen. This occurs if you don't have an internet connection, as the game attempts to access the internet and refuses to load until it gets an answer. The solution to this problem is to add /NOINETCONN to the command line of the runblack.exe file.

When Peter Molyneux presented B&W in the German TV-Show GIGA GAMES (NBC Europe), he activated the "show names"-function of the villagers. Then he scrolled over the land, gave his creature some advices and finally picked up a villager called "Jörg Langer", throwed him onto a huge mountain, Jörg fell down and landed in a forrest nearby. Peter Molyneux just said: "So you have to chop wood for the rest of your life!".

Jörg Langer is the Chief Editor of the German Games-Magazine who wrote a really bad review of B&W ("just" 84%)... and hundreds of thousand gamers watched him fly...

The editors of PC Gamer magazine ranked 'Black & White' #18 of the Top 50 Best Games of all time in their October 2001 issue.

Saved games for Black and White are a little unusual. When you save a game it records the status of the island, but not the status of you or your creature. Instead, the status of you and your creature are part of your profile which can't be restored once it changes. So if you save your game at level 1 with a good god and a small creature, proceed to level 5 with your creature becoming huge and your god becoming evil along the way, and restore the save file you'll end up with an evil god and a huge creature on level 1.

One of the groundbreaking features in this game is "gesture recognition", allowing players to cast spells by drawing shapes on the landscape with the mouse and precluding the need for any icons on the screen. According to Molyneux, this is a direct reaction to the massive amount of icons present in his last game for Bullfrog, "Dungeon Keeper". The icon interface for DK takes up a good third of the screen while playing.

Lionhead released a patch allowing you to create your own soccer pitch for your people to play in. When you have installed the patch, you can build the pitch with eight scaffolds from your workshop. And when your people have nothing to do, they come to the pitch and play for a while.

Contributed by Kartanym (9910) on Nov 12, 2001.

April Fools Trick: During the game on April 1st, Your monster will leave smiley face foot prints in the ground instead of their regular foot prints. You do this change your computer's date to April 1st.

Originally the game was to include humanoid 'avatars', but the team eventually concluded that stroking and smacking around humans was a bit disturbing, hence the bipedal animal forms.