It was monstrous, but great fun: a clumsy way of progressing articulated by a physics game, almost like skipping rocks across a placid lake. Eradicate them or terrify them into complicity. I have great memories of abandoning any hope for promoting sensible theology and just sat tossing fireballs and rocks at the edge of my influence-impassable borders determined by the reach of your believers' faith-and into opposing villages dedicated to another god. You, sometimes literally, massage the sandbox to steer it in your favor. In Black & White, you're a huge physics-bound hand, and it's the primary way you interact with the world. This isn't to say it gives you infinite, unbound power from the get-go or that it was the deepest and most strategically-varied of its kind, but Lionhead's first stab at a 3D version of the genre made your influence on the world feel far less abstract than in earlier god games, like Populous and Dungeon Keeper. Why care?īlack & White is still the only game that's made me feel like a god. Even then, getting Black & White to run on modern PCs isn't easy. Without those old CDs, players are stuck in purgatory, digging through boxes for old CDs or driven to piracy.