Black and White can now be played on modern PCs thanks to a fan-made engine, because EA and Molyneux are not going to do it.

Friends, good news: it's early 2000s all over again. You're young, possibly not even born yet, your Apple products have ports. Peter Molyneux, the master of heartbreak, is back and ready for you to break. Black and White has just been released.

Black and White 1 fan-made open-source engine reimplementation has just been revealed (via GamingOnLinux). Openblack, which has been in development for five years, got its first release yesterday. It's only a 0.1.0 version, not the full-fat 1.0. We're a long way off from the developers declaring that they're finished.

The engine is a C++ reimplementation that runs on your various devices and supports rendering engines such as Vulkan. It also supports Windows, macOS and Linux so you can play God on your Steam Deck. There's even "experimental" support for Android and iOS. It's still a little buggy in some areas. This is a 0.1 version, folks. If you download the game to try it out, consider yourself a tester rather than a player.

Black and White, as well as nearly the entire Lionhead work, is still as frustratingly unavailable as it was in 2019, when James Davenport complained about it. Openblack is not a game engine reimplementation that you can just download and play. You need to insert the files from the original to make it work. The only way you can (legitimately), get these files is on a CD.

This is an insult, of course. Strangely, Molyneux’s return has made me play Black and White 1 quite a bit in the last few weeks, and it is still as entertaining as when I played it back in 2001. It's still a joy to frighten villagers and teach my pet monkey how to rule with terror. There are some rough edges - most of the objectives are tedious and I won't be damned to nail any of the mouse-gesture based commands in my first attempt. But it's an odd and unique game that I love.

I'd love to see it get a proper release but there's nothing on the horizon. It's fortunate that projects like Openblack, and the Unofficial Fan Patch, are still around to keep the games alive, even when the powers-that-be refuse to. Thank god, I say.