Life With a Limited Palette

The dawn of a new millennium gave developers the sense that they could do anything. Implement amazing AI, create living worlds, and launch gaming into the mainstream. Black & White did none of these things, but just try getting its creator to admit that.

Gaming in the early 2000s was characterised by two things: superstar developers and hype. Maybe three things if you count the slow but inexorable rise of the PS2. But definitely hype and heroes.

Names like Richard Garriott, Chris Roberts, American McGee, John Romero, John Carmack, Warren Spector and so many more, filled our pages and exaggerated their talents with barely an inkling of self-awareness. And why not? Because those games needed a personality out the front (wit the odd exception of Blizzard and Westwood), to tell everyone that the game was going to blow their minds, be better than good, and most definitely do a whole bunch of stuff that the PCs of the day couldn’t possibly handle.

In the first decade of this troubled century, many, many games were badly overhyped, but perhaps none more so than Peter Molyneux’s magnum opus Black & White.

The concept was simple: the player is god. Or at least a god. And the player has ultimate agency over the game world. Everything else, including actual gameplay, would evolve from that core principle. Levels and scripted sequences? Forget about it. Black & White would be truly organic, an emergent experience in a time before the term “emergent experience” was applied to every half-baked action RPG with multiple endings.

Molyneux said in early interviews that it would be possible to do anything “physically sensible” – tear up trees and rocks, gouge out the earth, channel water, set fire to things, control the weather and, well, whatever the player could think of.

As a god, the player would also choose any living creature in the world, be it ant or antelope, whale or weasel, and cause it to grow into a giant version of itself which would then stroll about the countryside being a sort of avatar of the player’s godhead.

What’s more, this giant creature would have the most amazing learning AI ever programmed into a PC game, totally ever you guys, and it would learn and grow and develop a real personality.

If you’re thinking this all sounds a mite too ambitious to run on PCs with 32MB of RAM, well you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Black & White turned out to be the No Man’s Sky of 2001. Like the ill-fated “do anything, we promise” sandbox space sim, Black & White launched with quite a few features missing…

But unlike Sean Murray, Molyneux didn’t adopt radio silence, far from it. He gave interview after interview praising the game and telling everyone how much THEY loved it. He called Black & White the best game he’d ever seen, lionised (pun intended) its every aspect and heaped accolades on his team. He even seemed to like EA, his publisher.

Even more bizarrely, most of the gaming press at the time agreed with him. Black & White won awards, was called groundbreaking, breathtaking, world-shaking. It won awards.

So why am I couching all this in a tone that screams the word “but”? Because Black & White wasn’t any of that. Forget the next-gen tech: it wasn’t even a particularly good game.

The game as shipped did not match Molyneux’s promised Holy Grail of simulated awesomeness. Let us count the ways.

First, gone was the wide open world. Players were now gods of small islands, and fought other gods on adjacent islands by encouraging armies of tiny low-poly people to go on the warpath. It was RTS without any direct control of the units.

The poo-eating became emblematic of Black & White. Like Spore’s dickbeasts.

Second, forget being able to do “anything sensible”. Only some trees could be plucked, only some boulders disturbed. The player god had a set of spells at their disposal but launching them required mastering an awkward gesture-system: wiggle the mouse just the right way to do a lightning strike!

Third, the gestures were one of those things that look amazing and futureof-gaming in potted demos, but turned out to be awkward and ergonomically frustrating when actually needed to extinguish a burning village or set fire to a different village. Not that critics at the time didn’t call the gesture-based iconfree interface the greatest thing ever. Hey give them a break; there just weren’t that many games in 2001.

Fourth, the player’s affect on the world was not so much limited as, well, typical. Yes, the land turned progressively darker and more corrupt depending on the arbitrary evilness of player actions, but this really just amounted to slowly selecting a “good” faction vs a “bad” one.

But fifth and far and away the biggest disappointment was the Creature. Forget selecting any beast from the wilds. A limited selection – cow, ape, horse – appears early on and you choose. Yes, more creatures become unlockable later, but players quickly realised the AI was less “my digital best friend” and more “set of behaviours that slowly unlock and can be exploited for humorous effect.” In short, it’s possible to teach the Creature to eat poo. The poo-eating became emblematic of Black & White. Like Spore’s dickbeasts. (Don’t remember the dickbeasts? We’ll return to Spore in due course...)

Molyneux went on the record to explain that the ability to raise any living thing to Creaturehood was ditched not because it was technically unfeasible (it was) but rather ethically troublesome. That’s because part of training a Creature involves slapping it around – literally, with your godhand – and Molyneux didn’t want people slapping around a giant child. Of course Lionhead could have removed the slapping interaction but why ruin the best part of the game just to give people real choice? The same went for flying animals – a giant eagle would have “completely changed the game” according to Molyneux.

You might be the kind of pinko subversive deep green values neutral whacko who thinks hitting a baby giant monkey is barley any less ethical suspect than hitting an actual baby, but that’s not the point. Or maybe it is the point: Molyneux didn’t care either way. The game, according to him, was better for its lack of giant babies and monster ants.

In truth of course Lionhead had bitten off way more than it could chew. The team at large and Molyneux in particular saw the future potential of PC gaming, but had the misfortune of trying to realise their vision maybe 10-15 years too early. Implementing half the stuff they wanted just wasn’t technically possible.

Today of course our PCs, backed with maybe a little cloud processing power, could give Molyneux his borderline Turing-capable Creature, his rich and detailed world packed with content, his thousands of individually intelligent NPCs running about the place. And VR plus gesture control would have sent late-90s Molyneux into paroxysms of divine ecstasy.

I’ll never really understand why Black & White was so beloved of critics when it came out. I reviewed it myself for PCPP back in the ancient mists of time, and while I didn’t trash the game, I certainly acknowledged how far the reality fell short of the vision.

Later of course many outlets walked back their praise, and included Black & White on their lists of “most over-hyped games of all time.”

The irony? As a mobile or tablet game, Black & White would be awesome. A Creature you can poke and prod with the touchscreen, stomping his way over thousands of tiny peasants? It would be the perfect platform for making millions selling cartloads of god coins or whatever...