Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Black & White

It's kind of a gray area, right here. How far back must a game go to be deemed retro? Is 2001 distant enough to qualify? Well, when you've got a badass renegade mothereffer like me typing words at your face, yes. Yes it can.

Fourteen years is a pretty damn long time, after all. Ol' Justin Bieber was just a floppy-haired little ballache then, as opposed to the... little ballache with different hair and a couple shit tattoos that he is today. So I feel completely justified in adding Black & White to the ranks of Retro Love.

For the uninitiated, this is a revolutionary PC strategy title from Lionhead Studios. It's a diabolical twist on the god game genre, a kind of Populous-meets-the-bastardry-of-Dungeon Keeper sort of affair. Let's take a look.

You know how these games usually go down. You begin with nothing, and gradually carve out a charming, fancy-ass little slice of nirvana for your people to live in. You'll develop homes for them, provide resources, and all the other BS people need to flourish. Everything'll be bright and shiny, they'll be nice to each other, and the sun with shine out of everyone's anuses.

Your followers will fight for you during the occasional invasion, but otherwise everything's great. It's all a little too flowery and Lifetime TV for me. But Black & White, as the name suggests, offers you a moral aspect to shake things up.

It begins in the standard style. You take the role of a god, brought into existence by a family praying for their son, lost at sea. After you save his ass, the family take you back to their village and let you pick a creature. Your avatar for the game chosen, Black & White begins proper.

Your objective is to turn all of the tribes on the island to your cause. They can either love you or fear a lightning bolt to the ‘nads on a minute-by-minute basis, either works. All you'll need is their belief. To this end, you and your creature can perform all kinds of acts, and almost everything will contribute to your good or evil standing with the people. Will you save civilians from natural disasters, or leave them to fry? Will you send in your avatar to trample a building or two to help the hurricane along; the ultimate kick in their believer-asses? Your choice.

As with any karma system, the actions you take will have distinct consequences. The world itself will slowly transform according to your standing. An angelic realm for a goodly creator or a fiery hellhole worthy of the angry Satanic mofo you are.


Black & White's AI was pretty damn impressive at the time too. Your creature could be trained, by either slapping or stroking it after it performs actions. It would slowly learn to adapt its behaviour accordingly, and would take on a good or evil alignment for itself.

This one was well-received, for sure, but some think that it didn't quite live up to the hypetastic. The interaction with the world and such was a little more limited than expected. Still, this was a revolutionary genre entry, worth a re-visit.