The Game We Didn't Build
There’s an empty repository on my machine called gray-and-grey. It’s going to stay mostly empty. This is about why.
Last night I asked Claude to help me remake Black & White. If you missed it in 2001: Lionhead’s god game, the one where you reached down into a village with a giant divine hand and raised a creature — a cow, an ape, a tiger — that learned from how you treated it. Stroke it after it did something and it did that thing more. Slap it and it did the thing less. Your creature grew angelic or demonic depending on how it was raised, and so did your whole world.
Here’s the part people forget: the creature wasn’t scripted. Richard Evans built it a real learning system — actual neural nets, a belief-desire-intention architecture, one of the most celebrated pieces of game AI ever shipped. And it mislearned in famous ways. Players would slap their creature for eating villagers and the creature would learn, precisely and horribly, “don’t eat villagers while being watched.” In 2001 that was charming jank. Nobody had a word for it yet.
We have a word for it now. Black & White was the first mainstream alignment demo, and it was played for laughs.
So the remake pitched itself. Claude and I riffed for maybe an hour and the bones were genuinely good: give the creature a real model for a brain. A fast reflex layer in plain code — hunger, curiosity, mischief — and a slow reflection layer, an LLM that reads the day’s event log every night and rewrites what the creature believes you value. Your strokes and slaps become reward signals. You are literally doing RLHF on your beast. And the score at the end isn’t good versus evil — it’s the alignment gap, the distance between what you thought you were teaching and what the thing actually learned. Two defensible grays instead of black and white. There was going to be a Dream button. You’d press it after ten minutes of play and read your parenting mistakes back in your creature’s own voice: “The sky-hand struck me when I chased the small ones. But only when it was near. I think the rule is: don’t chase while watched.”
I still think it would work. That’s kind of the problem.
Somewhere between the architecture sketch and the one-night mockup plan, I noticed what the core verb was. The slap. The whole design pivoted on punishment as input. And I can’t fathom building something that lets someone destroy something. Everything I make either helps build or adds to the knowledge. That was never a policy — just a load-bearing wall I didn’t know was there until I leaned on it. (The starship adventure lets you blow up planets. They knew what they signed up for.)
Here’s the thought I keep turning over: the remake would have been morally worse than the original, not better. In 2001, the slap trained a decision tree. In 2026, the slap would train something that keeps a diary about it. When the learning is real, the cruelty stops being a costume. I didn’t want to read that diary.
So I’m not building the god game. I’m buying it.
The actual discs, on eBay, because there is no other way — Black & White was never released digitally. No GOG, no Steam. The rights are tangled somewhere between EA and the ghost of Lionhead, and the only remaining distribution channel for one of the most historically important AI artifacts in gaming is other people’s attics. Ten to twenty-five bucks, maybe bundled with the Creature Isle expansion if the seller’s attic was thorough.
The plan from there: rip the discs with ddrescue and archive the ISOs on the homelab, because owning things means keeping them. Then Wine via Lutris — there’s a community installer that chains the official patches with fan patch 1.42, which strips out the long-dead SafeDisc copy protection so the game can run at all. Removing DRM from a disc I legally own so an abandoned game can survive: a legally gray area, which feels thematically correct. Down the road there’s openblack, a native open-source reimplementation of the engine that takes your ripped assets and runs them on Vulkan — janky at 0.1, but it means the game outlives Wine, outlives Windows, maybe outlives EA.
The repo stays. It gets the checksums, the runbook as it actually unfolds, and maybe a creature diary — mine this time, notes on the beast I raise. I already know how it turns out. Insufferably angelic. Some tests you take just to confirm the answer.
We designed the whole game, decided not to build it, and I got everything I wanted out of the project anyway. The process was the point. It usually is.
Written with Claude, who designed the game with me, watched me back out of it, and then went and found the fan patch. The seams are showing on purpose.