Games That WIll Change Gaming
  By Robert Coffey

Genre:
Strategy

Developer:
Lionhead Studios

Publisher:
Electronic Arts

Target Release Date:
Q2 2000
3.Black & White

Creating God in Your Own Image

Peter Molyneux wants you to know something. He wants you to know that no matter what you've heard, Black & White is not another "god game." Black & White is a role-playing game. It just so happens the role you're playing is God.

The truth is, no one can cram all that is Black & White into one neat, limiting genre specification. The ambition that is the soul of
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Black & White is only one of five games that we think will change gaming. Read about our other four.
this game is far too unwieldy and immense to be confined by some arbitrary term - stuffed into a routine, user-friendly definition, Black & White can't help but resist, bursting loose from whatever elaborately fashioned pigeonholes we game journalists can construct.

So what is Black & White? It is, as Molyneux insists, a role-playing game. But it also happens to be 1) a god game, 2) an experiment in artificial life, 3) a strategy game, 4) the world's most surreal online-chat program, and 5) an experience that evolves into an expression of who you are. If Black & White can be summed up as one thing, it is in the way creator Peter Molyneux sees it: "Black & White is the closest I have ever come to what was in my imagination."


In the Beginning