Your disembodied hand shakes with power that won’t stay contained. It can wipe out forests, summon storms, and keep villagers locked into one narrow purpose for the duration of their brief lives—whether that’s fishing, for example, or the most basic human urge of all: procreation (yes, shagging). But in Black & White, which just marked its 25th anniversary, your godlike authority over thoughts and physical reality stops short of governing the unpredictable presence moving across the green expanse below. This pesky figure may look like your divine command given flesh, but it’s also notorious for resisting that command at the worst possible times.
Even Richard Evans—the AI engineer behind Black & White—couldn’t reliably forecast how the creature would act. In 2000, the mayor of Guildford was being escorted around Lionhead Studios, the town’s new flagship in a rapidly expanding game development scene. During a demonstration, the creature (an ape in this instance) decided the presentation should go in a totally different direction. “The creature defecated, picked up its own feces, examined it, appeared to sniff it, and then consumed it,” Evans recalls. His fast, slurred delivery and rumpled appearance bring to mind cinema’s most recognizable eccentric scientist, Emmett “Doc” Brown. “Then,” Evans adds, “the creature got sick all over a villager, causing the villager to tumble off a cliff.”
The episode Evans describes is pure slapstick: a ridiculous sequence of events that, despite the comedy, still points to the huge level of intelligence behind each of the creature’s smart—or nonsensical—decisions. To be fair to the animal, it could also be genuinely useful, helping to irrigate crops, yanking up and tossing trees into a lumberyard, and even stepping in as a caregiver for the children in your village. As a deity, you raised it, shaping its adaptable personality into a believable extension of your own lessons. All of this takes place in a game that’s (and remains) exceptional for several reasons: the minimalist UI looks strikingly, elegantly modern, and the morality system is wonderfully flexible. Still, what lingers most in people’s minds is the creature itself—a sharp, self-directed companion, not an entertaining monkey or a tame little pet.
Now, the being—capable of taking on different shapes such as bear, lion, tortoise, and more—stands as one of the most ambitious examples of AI ever attempted in video games. It grew in part from designer Peter Molyneux’s bold ideas and from Evans’ technical expertise. Black & White has also become a well-known, detailed footnote in the wider, fast-moving conversation about AI. Evans later joined Google DeepMind, a firm founded in 2010 by his former colleague from Lionhead Studios, Demis Hassabis. No company captures both the promise and the dangers of AI better than Google DeepMind: it has lofty ambitions to benefit society—such as using the technology to help answer demanding scientific questions, including the structure of proteins (a discovery that contributed to Hassabis winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry).
Yet it’s tied just as directly to technology’s more troubling, tragic side. Think of the occasionally off-base “AI summaries” pulled from media organizations that now show up alongside Google search results. Or, even more seriously, consider reports of the tech giant being sued over the alleged role a Gemini chatbot played in the death of a 36-year-old man in Florida. The connection from Black & White to Google DeepMind is hard to miss: AI has escaped the boundaries of the game world—where the consequences are comparatively contained—and moved into the real environment, where the stakes can be genuinely life-or-death.
Even if the stakes are higher now, people still seem to interact with today’s AI in ways that feel oddly similar to how players treated Black & White’s creature in the early 2000s. The dynamic between humans and machines continues to be open-ended and conversational. In Black & White, that feel comes from one key design decision: the creature can learn. Most game-based AI is “knowledge-driven,” says Mike Cook, an AI researcher at King’s College London, meaning that “an AI system is provided with all it needs to reason about matters.” The creature in Black & White, though, is “data-driven”—its actions aren’t fixed in advance, but shift according to what the player does. “For many individuals, this would have been one of the first experiences of a digital entity adjusting itself in response to something they had done,” he notes.
The creature that sent Evans from the Lionhead offices in Guildford to Google DeepMind’s prestigious headquarters in London began with just a handful of simple sketches Molyneux made on a sheet of A4 paper. “I thought, let’s create a game with an AI agent in it,” Molyneux says, sometimes pausing to take a pull from a vape in the workspace of his current studio, 22Cans. “We aimed to explore the idea of morality and funnel that morality through this entity—the creature. You could build an evil creature, a kind creature, or anything along the spectrum.”
Mark Healey, an artist and animator on Black & White (who co-founded Media Molecule in 2006), puts the project’s ambition more sharply: “Tamagotchi on steroids,” he claims during a video call, sliding his long hair back away from his face.
Something clearly caught fire in the cultural mood of the mid-to-late ’90s. Tamagotchi launched in 1996, and it led tens of millions of people—including Molyneux—to care for those tiny 8-bit companions. Creatures, the animal-raising simulator, arrived the same year, and the little-known Dreamcast virtual pet simulator Seaman followed in 1999. Each of these games, much like Black & White, reflected developers trying to make something that felt alive and responsive by wrestling with the basic binary logic behind computers.
The virtual pets that emerged may have been fairly basic, yet what players felt toward them was genuinely revealing. Molyneux still recalls the distress he felt when his own Tamagotchi was “drowned” in a cup of coffee by Andy Robson, Lionhead’s head of testing, who had grown tired of the constant electronic chirping. “The device short-circuited. It was gone,” Molyneux says. “It was only a plastic egg. It shouldn’t have meant anything to me, but since I had looked after it and it had
became part of my everyday routine, and I truly felt the absence of it. I remember thinking, ‘Why am I so upset about this? Why do I now look at Andy Robson with nothing but contempt?’”
In 1998, Hassabis left Lionhead to launch Elixir Studio (working on another
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Compared with the turn of the millennium, the picture in 2026 feels noticeably more subdued—and AI is actively reshaping it into something quicker, stranger, and harder to predict: slopaganda has seeped into political debate; misleading information is spreading; AI companies are drawing on global RAM replacing; autonomous lethal systems erase people entirely. As Geoffrey Hinton—the computer scientist (and a socialist)—often framed as the father of AI—suggests, the danger level is growing: a bigger threat now hangs over what comes next. He argues that instead of human intelligence being copied, it has been surpassed; and there’s a further twist—he believes it may even be immortal. Hinton stepped down from his vice president role at Google in 2023 to warn the world about the risks tied to his life’s work: what began as an advocate for AI has turned into its grim forewarning.
Today’s AI landscape makes the gaming experiments carried out by Evans, Molyneux, and Hassabis feel almost quaint. Still, the link is plain to see. “Video games remain an ‘exciting testing ground for experimenting with AI,’” Evans says. One reason is that typical game environments don’t present major safety concerns. That lets researchers run a large number of simulations at a fast pace. Often, as in Black & White, the agents also have a physical presence—something that carries real weight for robotics work. “There are several angles of AI research that can be examined in game-like settings,” Evans adds. “That was one of the motivations behind Demis’ vision for DeepMind.”
After DeepMind was formed by Google, the company revealed impressive breakthroughs: AlphaGo beat Go champion Lee Sedol; AlphaStar surfaced as an elite Starcraft 2 player; and a DeepMind program defeated human competitors in Quake 3. By 2026, Genie 3 was making headlines for its ability to build 3D worlds—simple when it comes to truly interactive behavior, but still a clear sign of how AI can function as both a creator of worlds and a technology for understanding them.
“Of course, there are many implications for entertainment, and for building games and videos,” Hassabis said in an interview with the US program 60 Minutes. “But the bigger goal is to build a world model—a model that can understand our environment… You can imagine a next version that can generate an almost endless range of simulated worlds in which the AIs can learn and interact, and then transfer that learning to the real world.”
Hassabis’ comments carry the kind of all-knowing force people usually associate with gods. It feels natural, then, that he—and the system he represents—has such a close relationship with the ‘god’ game category.
His previous employer, Molyneux, speaks in a more human, personal way when discussing why ‘god’ games are appealing. He reflects on why he has dedicated his career to that style, and he will likely seal it by finishing it with one more in the upcoming Masters of Albion. “It’s not about ‘playing god,’” Molyneux argues. “It’s about having a huge amount of influence over a small world, and the people in it.”
Instead, “it comes from childhood,” he says. “When I was a kid, I heard a story that stayed with me. It was a short tale about a family that kept a cage with a small home inside, where tiny gnomes lived. Something went wrong with the gnomes, and they started acting aggressively toward the family. For a long time, I daydreamed about those little creatures—about caring for them. My games aren’t always about taking control of something. For me, it’s more about supporting, holding responsibility, and dealing with consequences. Those are the questions I find—still find—exciting.”
What could be more lighthearted, delightful, and rewarding than watching your creature follow your instructions on its own in a virtual space it can call its own? Caring for crops; at last learning to eat sheep instead of humans; street-dancing to entertain those same hardworking residents. This is playful AI that doesn’t promise efficiency gains at work or eye-popping returns for shareholders. Unlike many AI tools used today, it runs on a single desktop computer rather than a data center that depends on vast electricity demand—demand that can translate into millions of gallons of water being used to cool hot computing hardware.
Just as the Black & White creature exists mainly to amuse and irritate the player, it now feels like a leftover artifact. Yet the challenging ideas Evans wrestled with when building it—especially perception and consciousness—carried forward into later years, providing a foundation for his PhD thesis, which he later developed into a research paper while linked with Google DeepMind (and later expanded). “When you build today’s AI, part of you is always thinking about the future,” Evans notes. In that sense, the creature becomes a small but meaningful note in the broader story of AI: a lovable mischief-maker and, in a way, a stepping stone on the road toward a much stronger form of intelligence.