Black & White

Developer Lionhead Studios Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC Release 2001

Picture it: a suited exec walks on to a stage and announces a new game about influencing and controlling people, about good and evil. And the clincher: it’ll all be driven by machine learning. In 2019, that game has to be a dystopia. That’s where our imaginations go now when we hear anything about AI and social control, as reluctant members of the Cambridge Analytica generation. There’d be a grim synthwave drone underpinning scenes of trenchcoated cyberpunks. There would be absolutely no apes casting spells.

But 2001 was a very different time, and took those exact elements, simian wizards and all, and turned them into a joyful sandbox without even a whiff of the sinister about it. In many ways it was a natural extension of Peter Molyneux’s favourite themes, and by the turn of the millennium his particular fingerprint was already familiar. Bullfrog’s back catalogue had consistently offered famously empowered you not just to build an eponymous theme park, but also to lead thrill-seekers to their demise – at least gastrointestinally – on your rides. made that motif explicit, more or less inviting you to build torture chambers for heroes to navigate. Even the more straight-laced Bullfrog series, , featured throwaway human sacrifice and wanton destruction of rival tribes’ villages. Above all in every Bullfrog game the kick was in controlling people, according to whatever personal moral compass you decided to adhere to.