Why has Black & White Been Abandoned? - Noclip Greatest Hits

What are your memories of playing Black & White?

I can't believe that someone hasn't brought this back as a VR title. It opens it to a whole new generation of people and its gameplay seems so cohesive with VR.

I worked at Lionhead and on Black & White as a tester. It was a brief but amazing time. It was March 2000, and the atmosphere at the studio was incredible. Everyone was so damn talented and so friendly. I’m not sure if you’ll see this message Danny but if you’re interested I do have some assets I created about my time there.

For the amount of crap Peter gets, I have to admire him, him and his teams are responsible for so many of my favourite games growing up.

I remember that on the second or third island (my memory gets fuzzy here) my Creature took over villages on his own when I left him alone. Simply by going there and performing miracles for them. This blew me away. B&W is one of those games that really should get a remaster or a remake. Imagine what could be done with today AI and how cool it would look with current graphics. Probably won't ever happen, but a man can dream though

This game still has my favorite memory of gaming. I left my cow chain out by some villagers while I do other stuff. When I came back, the villagers were playing music while the cow was dancing. I couldn’t believe it my eyes.

Black and white was one of the games that made me fall in love with gaming, it's such a shame it just vanished

Needs a remake desperately, it was AMAZING

The Movies and Black & White 2 and Fable were probably my most played games of the 2000’s. You can imagine how much of a fan of Peter and Lionhead I was.

I was 10 when I first played B&W1 , and now I’m 30. But I instantly remembered the sailor’s song when heard it. It was the best game of my childhood, I spent countless hours playing this and the second game. One of the best memories of my early years is when I played these games on my old computer.

Thanks for this, it was great. I worked at Lionhead as a gameplay & AI coder from 2004 to 2012. I was unable to attend the reunion as I was ill and didn’t want to risk it in case it was covid, but I was welling up at that point - in my almost 2 decades in the games industry many of the best times & memories come from my LH years, so many great and wonderful people worked there and I miss them and that atmosphere. It was special, never been anywhere else like it. Black & White 2 was my first professional game dev job and you’ll be glad to know we kept Black & White’s scheduling - when I interviewed there we were a month from alpha, we went alpha a year later. The Movies is in a similar rights mess I believe, but at least with MS purchasing Activision there’s hope there.

I dont even care ive said it once and ill say it again, the gaming industry needs more people with such passion and inspiring vision as peter molyneux

One thing in this game scared the crap out of me as a kid.. I was sitting in the dark playing it and it whispered my name!! They actually created sound files for a whole list of the most common names! I didn't even remember entering my name (you do so at the very start and it's never used other than to scare you after a few hours of playing).

the creature AI in black and white is really cool even today and held back mostly by a lack of information for the players on what was possible for it and how it changed each time you trained it. You can teach it to do most actions you can do including casting your miracles. It has systems for how it grows that determine its physical capabilities too. Each reward influences its behavior on several levels at once based on the details of what it last did, how it did it, who it did it to, and some other factors (ie. was I hungry when I ate? Did the town need the food I gave them?). It legitimately feels more like training an actual animal than anything else I've experienced and you can eventually train it to do things like care for the needs of villages for you, convert neutral villages, attack enemies, etc on its own. It really is the deepest aspect of the whole game.

i actually played B&W 2 last year and i still have it on my computer... the nostalgy that it brings me every time. the fact that you can make all the decisions for the creature is unbeliveble. MAKE it come back for us SOMEONE PLEASE DO!!!

"My heart just filled up with pride...we had done such incredible things..." Twenty years later, my kids are at school right now, they are almost the same age as I was when I played B&W. My chest feels hollow. This video shows up in my feed and throws decades old memories in my face. We are a strange species of animal.

Black & White, GTA 3 and Max Payne in 2001, what an awesome year for gaming and me as a 16 years old... thanks to Peter and his staff for making these gems back then...

I love the "if anyone knew why these games were stuck in limbo, it would be them" line in regards to GOG...after just speaking with two of the guys who actually made the game. That speaks volumes to how good GOG is at what they do.

the thing I love most about danny and noclip is that we'll get 25 minutes of beautifully edited footage and incredibly professional production, and then during the credits sequence he'll do what every ten year old did in 2001 and make a polygonal animal eat its own poop

One of my favourite games of all time, I'd love to play it again. I've never encountered a game like it since, it had so many unique aspects to it that you don't see in modern games.