You may not be remotely surprised to learn that while making Black & White, the god game in which you can care for a three-story tall cow, many of the developers at Lionhead were smoking marijuana. As Peter Molyneux tells it in a recent anniversary piece for Eurogamer: “If there’s any stimulant that aids creativity, it’s weed.”
The developers interviewed do point out that this wasn’t everyone on the team. “It would get to six o’clock, which was the official end of the day, and the ‘normal’ people with families would go home, and we’d just skin up,” says Mark Healey, who went on to found Media Molecule. “I’d just sit down in the office smoking a big fucking reefer.”
While you may not be shocked by this revelation, I have to tell you, it’s thrown me into something of an existential crisis. You see, in 2006, I spent a week doing work experience at Lionhead’s offices and I was never once offered a toke, let alone a bowl of the weed-laced chilli con carne that apparently came out at office parties.
Does this mean I was seen as “normal”? (Or were they just too chicken to offer drugs to a 15-year-old schoolboy doing a week’s work experience in the QA department looking for bugs in Black & White 2‘s Battle of the Gods and The Movies‘ Stunts & Effects expansions? We’ll never know.)
I can’t tell you if in the six years between working on the original Black & White and its sequel the studio had changed its culture, or if the chilli was chucked out with the Microsoft acquisition in April 2006, or if I was just seen as too square to want creativity-inducing drugs. Maybe they held them back from the QA department. After all, from what I remember, we did win most of the lunchtime interdepartmental LAN games of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.
What I can tell you is that there was a day that Molyneux bought everyone in the office MacDonalds, and I have forever been compromised on reporting on Lionhead because the big man bought me a Big Mac.
Lewis Gordon’s Eurogamer article makes for fascinating reading because Black & White was a groundbreaking game. As the AI researcher Mike Cook says, “For lots of people, this would have been one of the first experiences of a digital thing reconfiguring itself in response to something they’d done.” (You can read more of Mike’s good words in his article on DLSS 5 and how Nvidia is rewriting the truth of our eyes.) Even now, more than 20 years after playing it, I have vivid memories of playing with my creature and trying to teach it to dump its hot, steaming ‘fertiliser’ on my people’s fields and cast a rain spell over the crops.
It’s also one of the games Molyneux was involved with before the accumulated baggage of his promises to players and the press got ahead of him. It’s a sign of how good a game Black & White was that, for everything that happened with cube-clicking Curiosity, hopelessly unfinished Godus, and NFT-laden Legacy, I am still excited for the upcoming Masters of Albion. That optimism is purely born from how strong my affection for Black & White and its sequel burn so many years after their release.
Of course, I would say that: the man bought me a Big Mac.
