Black & White was a god game that frustrated more often than it delighted, but which was nevertheless delivered with enough verve and ambition to be worth playing. It’s a crying shame that it’s not currently available to buy anywhere digitally, presumably because the rights are soaked in a gutter between EA (the original publisher) and Microsoft (who bought and closed developers Lionhead).
If you do still own a physical copy of Black & White however, you might be interested in Openblack. It’s a fan-led project to create a modern, open source engine for running Black & White, and its first build was just released yesterday.
Openblack has been in development for several years – since at least 2018 – with people contributing to the project over on Github. You can now download it as a pre-built binary, although there’s still some command line fiddling necessary to actually get it to run.
That command line requirement is a signal that it’s still in many ways early days for the project. Its developers consider it v0.10, so I wouldn’t necessarily rush to dig out your old discs yet. Still, there’s a lot of potential here for those seeking a version of Black & White that runs better on modern machines and which has support for more operating systems. There’s already a Linux build available, for example.
In short, I’d like to be able to play Black & White on Steam Deck one day, and this is likely the only avenue by which that’s ever going to happen.
Even if it’s impossible to buy digitally, it’s not impossible to play Black & White on modern computers if you do own a copy, merely less than ideal. For those willing to try, I think these old instructions, which includes installing a slightly-modernising fan patch, should still work.
And of course, if it’s a choice between following a fan-led open source project to modernise Black & White, or following Masters Of Albion, I’d wager the former is more worth my time.
Thanks, GamingOnLinux.
