Black & White

aka: B&W, Black & White: Entdecke dein wahres Ich, Black & White: Find out who you really are, Black & White: Odkryj, kim naprawdÄ™ jesteĹ›, Black & White: Ontdek wie je werkelijk bent, Black & White: Scopri chi sei veramente, Black and White, Hei yu Bai
Moby ID: 3598
Windows Specs
Buy on Windows
$30.00 used on eBay
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/29 2:30 AM )
Add-on (official) Included in

Description official descriptions

Spiritual descendant of the Populous games, Black & White is a 'god' game in which players take the role of a fledgling deity, called upon by people in need.

Entering the 3D world, players can manipulate objects, move people, and cast miracles. To assist the player, there also exists a creature with its own intelligence and personality. Both the players and their associated creature will evolve during the course of the game, becoming benevolent beings, cruel tyrants, or somewhere in between. As the player's characters develop, both their creature and the land itself will change, depending on their alignment.

Although the main purpose of the game is to work through the five lands of Eden and win the faith of as many of the tribes as possible, the game is somewhat open ended in its aspects of wandering, exploring, and developing the sidekick creature.

The creatures in the game feature their own artificial intelligence and will grow like a child, both physically and emotionally. They'll learn by example and put together their own moral codes based on what they witness and learn. Players can pet or scold their creature, nurture it, spoil it, or abuse it. In the end, Black & White is part strategy game, part role-playing game, part child rearing simulator, and part self-examination of the player's personality.

Spellings

  • 黑与白 - Simplified Chinese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

Credits (Windows version)

357 People (333 developers, 24 thanks) · View all

Dutch Localization (U-Trax Multi Media Localization B.V.)
Dutch Language Test
Dutch Recording Studio
  • Soundwise
Dutch Voice Actors
Concept and Design Lead
Programming
3D Programming
Artificial Intelligence
Art
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 52 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 138 ratings with 13 reviews)

Its good, but not really THAT good

The Good
Presentation is swish, straight from the start of the game you are lead thru things in a very graphically beautiful way.

Interface is unique.. simple to look at..

Creatures are fun to begin with, are funny and quite well animated

Interaction with email... WAY too cute an idea

The Bad
Interface is fiddly way too easy to get the wrong spell in heat of battle.

Graphics are just eye candy glossing over basically an updated Populous (not a bad thing really, BUT means not everyone can see all this as it pushes tech specs to the heavens)

Creatures are DUMB, they may get better later on, but the simple fact that they will wander outside your area of control means u have to drop things to go tend them (yeh i know people will say its part of how you play the game to keep control of them)

LINEAR - its not as open ended as made out.. set pieces are all over the shop, and you have to do certain things to enable progression (again i expect people to say that you have expect this)

The Bottom Line
Populous with graphics, and big creatures

Windows · by Jason Walker (1695) · 2001

Where's the fun?

The Good
Considering all that the game was to accomplish, the graphics were surprisingly good. Especially amazing was the animation that was encoded in the avatar/pet.

The music was beautiful and diverse, taking arrangements from different cultures and places. The idea of miracles and casting was pretty cool. Fairly easy to learn how to play.

The Bad
Oh, so many disappointing things about this game. The hand control scheme was difficult to handle. The continual fedex missions and the requirement to babysit the avatar at the same time became nigh impossible by the 2nd land.

The Bottom Line
Beautiful, but Tedious.

Windows · by Scott Monster (986) · 2006

An exercise in AI but really not enough of a game

The Good
The hype surrounding this beast was HUGE and frankly Lionhead had no way of making it what everyone expected it to be. Which was a pity really because this has so much going for it.

Technically, Black & White is astounding. The complete freedom of movement, viewpoint and personal game-playing style has hardly ever been seen before and certainly not done to this degree. It's perfectly possible to zoom in to the extent that a sheep takes up the whole screen, and it's just as easy to zoom out so the whole island and then some can be seen. With such a difficult trick to pull off, it was always going to be hard to get the control system to work effectively with a fully viewable and rotatable 3D world. And, while not without fault, it does the job pretty much as well as it could have done.

The Gesture Recognition Technology is a neat addition (of course, that is ALL it is...) and works well for the most part. It's nice to be able to train yourself to swing the mouse around effortlessly to pull off the funkiest spells. To this day, I still haven't managed one of them though.

The AI is the game's biggest asset. The incredible intelligence of your creature; which can be trained, learns from experience, learns from watching you, learns from watching anything else, picks up habits, forms a personality, forms a physique, and pretty much becomes the physical shape of your style of playing; is almost too beautiful for words. Memories get formed so easily: I remember a time when I was spending hours teaching my pet monkey to play football. By the end it was having so much fun I was worried it was going to starve, so I stuck it in it's pen and went off to do other things. I was wandering around the land aimlessly after a few days had past in the game. My monkey couldn't sleep so, to my disbelief, he got up, looked around the village, felt worried, spotted the ball, clapped with enjoyment, rushed over to get it, took it to his pen and started kicking it against the wall for fun.

Wow.

That wasn't scripted. It wasn't "told" to do that by the game. It just did it. That's just...staggering. Oh and the graphics are good too.

The Bad
But OH NO! It all goes horribly wrong! After so many right ingredients, Lionhead suddenly undercook the whole thing. There is no game in Black & White!

Well OK there is. But not much of one. The fact is, the total freedom that you are presented actually becomes boring as hell after a while because there simply isn't enough to do. There is always something to be doing, but just not enough. Your jobs are always mundane and monotonous as hell. Sometimes you have to reach just far enough outside your influence to grab a tree and take it to your village store. Except you have to repeat this mind-numbing task about 50 times to get enough wood. Then you have to build a house with that wood so that you may expand your influence by a centimetre before doing the whole thing again. All so you can take over another village by impressing/helping them. For example...say...by giving them wood. It's enough to make you nail your face to the wall.

The spells are dire for the most part. Don't think on the levels of Populous-style carnage. There are no earthquakes and volcanoes here. In terms of attack: fire and lightning are pretty much your only options. The others are just boring.

Also, if you were a God, would you spend all your time fishing or chopping down trees for people? The extraordinary AI of your creature is almost negated by the abysmal AI of your followers. They don't do ANYTHING for themselves. This means killing them is one of the only satisfying options. This in turn unbalances the moral slant on the game because it is ten times easier to complete it being evil than being good.

I know I touched on this too but the levels are just boring. The worst of which is level 3. Not only do you have to spend something like 20 hours trying to overtake some cities with an absurdly high belief in another God and are miles outside of your influence; but they take away your creature! Are they stupid?! That's the whole reason anyone is playing this game!

The Bottom Line
It could have been the RPG to end all others. It wasn't, and this is a crying shame. It had so many things in the right place but Lionhead forgot to add a game with them. So we have a completely open-ended production with nice graphics, AI without peer, some clever tricks but...what are you supposed to DO half the time again? Er....

Windows · by Shazbut (163) · 2002

[ View all 13 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Obscene Hermit And Wan Mar 18, 2009
HOW-TO: weather system And Wan Mar 3, 2009
Naming your Villagers from your email program And Wan Mar 2, 2009
Black & White Multiplayer Hints, Tips & Advice And Wan Mar 1, 2009
Creature Changer Crashing And Wan Mar 1, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Black & White appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Scrapped versions and plans

A version for Sony PlayStation was in development at one point by Bethesda, as well as for Sega Dreamcast probably by other developer - there were also plans to release this title for Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Ports were eventually cancelled and plans never reached a development status.

April 1st

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

Avatars

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.

Death

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.

Gestures

One of the 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.

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.

References

  • When Peter Molyneux presented Black & White 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", threw him onto a huge mountain, Jörg fell down and landed in a forest nearby. Peter Molyneux just said: "So you have to chop wood for the rest of your life!". At the time, Jörg Langer was the Chief Editor of the German gaming magazine GameStar which wrote an unenthusiastic review of the game ("just" 84%).
  • 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.

Sailor Song

The famous Sailor Song was, in the english version, sung by the Lionhead-people.

Sales

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.

Saving

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.

Soccer pitch

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.

Weather

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

Awards

  • Gamespy
    • 2001 – Strategy Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
    • 2001 – Best Articial Intelligence of the Year
    • 2003 - Most Overrated Game of all Time* PC Gamer
    • June 2001 - Game of the Month
    • October 2001 - #18 in the "Top 50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • PC Powerplay (Germany)
    • Issue 03/2005 - #2 Biggest Disappointment
    • Issue 02/2006 - #2 Hype Disappointment
  • Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland
    • 2001 - Platinum Award
    • 2001 - Gold Award

Information also contributed by Alan Chan, Andrew Hartnett, Felix Knoke, Indra was here, Kartanym, Lumpi, PCGamer77, Sciere, Scott Monster, Ummagumma, Xoleras and Zack Greene

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Black & White: Creature Isle
Released 2002 on Windows, Macintosh
Black & White: Deluxe
Released 2002 on Macintosh, Windows
1/2: White or Black
Released 2023 on Windows
Intrigue!
Released 1986 on Commodore 64, Apple II
Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods
Released 2006 on Windows
Stranger of Sword City
Released 2016 on Xbox One, PS Vita, Windows
White Day: A Labyrinth Named School
Released 2001 on Windows
White Knight Chronicles
Released 2008 on PlayStation 3

Related Sites +

  • Black & White
    Official website
  • Official Game Site
    The Official Site for Black & White, which includes links to other fan web sites and the ability to register to play online.
  • Official Webpage (Mac)
    The official product page for the Mac version of Black & White on the publisher's website, which provides a profile of the game, a rundown of its features, an overview of the game's creatures, and purchasing information, among other such things.
  • Official WinAmp Plug-In
    A little before the release of the game, Lionhead made a visualization plug-in for WinAmp. It uses the game's graphic engine to show the bear dancing along with your music. The day passes to night and disco lights will also appear in the display.
  • Planet Black & White
    A fan page that is updated at least daily with new stuff, including 'bonus' creatures and other downloads.
  • The Final Hours of Black & White
    GameSpot covered the wrap-up production of Black & White in this lengthy article in their "Behind the Games" series.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 3598
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Ray Soderlund.

Macintosh added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: nullnullnull, Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, JPaterson, Corn Popper, formercontrib, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger, yenruoj_tsegnol_eht (!!ihsoy), FatherJack, Danfer, R3dn3ck3r.

Game added April 3, 2001. Last modified March 6, 2024.