New fan-made engine makes Black and White playable on modern PCs, because god knows neither EA or Molyneux is going to do it

Good news, friends: It’s the early 2000s again. You are young—possibly not even born—your Apple products have ports, Peter Molyneux is back and ready to break your heart, and Black and White just got a release.

Specifically, Black and White 1’s fan-made, open-source engine reimplementation just broke cover (via GamingOnLinux). Openblack has been cooking for the last five years and got its initial release yesterday. That’s a 0.1.0 release, mind you, not a full-fat 1.0 thing. We’re still a ways off from the devs declaring they’re done.

The engine is a modern C++ reimplementation of the original game with support for rendering engines like Vulkan and that runs on all your myriad devices. It’s also got support for Windows, macOS, and Linux, so you can play god on your Steam Deck, plus “experimental support” for Android and iOS. Note that it’s still a bit janky in several areas—this is a 0.1 release, folks. Consider yourself more of a tester than a player if you download it to give it a shot.

Don’t get mixed up: Black and White (and nearly the entire Lionhead oeuvre) is still as frustratingly inaccessible as it was when James Davenport was complaining about it in 2019. You can’t just download Openblack and start playing, you need to slot the files from the original game into it to make it all work, much like you do with other game engine reimplementations like Morrowind’s OpenMW. Pretty much the only way to (legitimately) get those files is to have them on a disc.

Which is an affront, of course. Weirdly enough, Molyneux’s return has had me get into Black and White 1 a fair bit over the last week or two, and it’s still just as entertaining as it was when I first played it all the way back in 2001. Hocking villagers about and teaching my pet monkey to rule through terror is still an absolute joy. Sure, there are some rough edges—most of the actual objectives are kind of tedious and I’ll be damned if I ever nail any of the game’s mouse-gesture-based commands on my first go—but it’s a weird and unique game I have a great deal of affection for.

I’d love for it to get a proper release, but there’s no sign of one on the horizon. Lucky, then, that projects like Openblack and the Unofficial Fan Patch are around to keep the game alive even when the powers that be refuse to. Thank god, I say.