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An early mock-up of what the Citadel might look like in the game. |
By the spring of 1998, most of the team for Black & White had been assembled in Guildford. Everyone agreed the concept was grand, accessible, and potentially groundbreaking--that is, if it could be successfully executed. Despite the complexity of the game, Lionhead was dead-set against increasing the team beyond 25 employees. The small-cohort environment would avoid the layer of middle management that had crept into Bullfrog as it grew from 20 to 100 employees. "While having only 25 people means that we're all definitely run off our feet, it also means people have a much tighter hold on what they're doing--there's not much hierarchy," explains Alex Evans, who plays a cello in his spare time and also moonlights as a graphical artist.
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With a hint of embarrassment, Peter Molyneux holds up the worst programmer of the week sign. |
Everyone on the team does have a specialty, including Molyneux, who spends at least 70 percent of his time programming. For Black & White, Molyneux began programming the villagers in early 1998 and carried through work on them until the later part of 2000, only to switch over to program the computer AI player. (Although Molyneux won't admit it, Robson says that Molyneux is often at the top of his "Worst Programmer of the Week" list, based on who has the most crash bugs in his code.) Nevertheless, by being conversant in the game's internal workings, Molyneux is in the trenches with his team, sitting in the big war room with the same desk space as every other employee. In fact, he even has a circular blue rear-view mirror stuck to his computer monitor so he can keep track of what the rest of the team is doing while he is coding.
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A screenshot of the first version of Black & White, as shown to the press at E3 in 1998. |
With only three months of work under Lionhead's belt, Molyneux set off in June of 1998 to attend E3 in Atlanta, Georgia. There, in a makeshift room on the show floor, he unveiled the game's concept. For each game he creates, Molyneux first builds a "test bed" version, which is the basic gameplay stripped of the usual accoutrements of fancy graphics and sound. For Black & White's test bed, the environment was an isometric green wireframe world; each villager was represented by a little pixel on the screen. The demo shown at E3 even crashed multiple times, and when it did, Molyneux would go into Microsoft Developer Studio and fix the bug before restarting the demo.
- Will Wright, creator of The Sims
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Even though the little villagers simply walked around in formations like lemmings, the buzz about Black & White coming out of E3 1998 was all based on what Molyneux was saying about the game's epic concept. "There's a side to Peter that is very much an entertainer," explains Will Wright. "You just have to see him give a demo to understand that."
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