The Gaming Den

I made a list

Black Female Protagonists
Enter the Matrix
Urban Chaos
Resident Evil 5
Remember Me
Assassin's Creed: Liberation
Catwoman
Bebe's Kids


Black Male Protagonists
Michael Jackson: Moonwalker
Shaq-Fu
Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City
Charles Barkley Shut Up & Jam: Gaiden 2

Tiger Woods PGA Tour
Daley Thompson's Decathalon
Frank Bruno's Boxing

50 Cent: Bulletproof
Sanity: Aiken's Artifact
Blade
Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style
Afro Samurai
Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure
Ghetto Blaster

L.A. Rush
Men of Valor
Saw
SiN
Alien vs Predator
Crackdown
Saints Row 2
True Crime: New York City
Bad Boys: Miami Takedown
25 to Life
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Bad Day L.A.
Starhawk
The Suffering
The Walking Dead
Prototype 2
Crysis 3
Spawn (various titles)
Knuckles: Chaotix
Killer 7
Shadowman 1 & 2
Akuji the Heartless
Papo & Yo

Anything else that could be added?

The Walking Dead: Season Two (by Telltale Games) features a black female protagonist: Clementine. Also, I noticed you mentioned Season One in your Black Male protagonists lists (Lee). Good catch.

Eternal Darkness has a chapter wherein you play as a black firefighter.

Other chapter-protagonists include

-An Arabic nobleman
-A Cambodian woman

If we're going Old-School, Streets of Rage.

Streets of Rage III was very progressive: it had a whopping total of two black characters (Skate, Adam's... newphew? Brother? something like that, and Dr. Xan) and a kangaroo.

The later Mortal Kombat games also have some black protagonists.

Do games where you can customize your character count? 'Cause if so, then you can add every TES game, Fallout 3 and NV, Soul Caliber, Dragon Quest IX...

Also, who the hell in Knuckles Chaotix was black? Unless your talking about Knuckles himself, since in his early appearances (mainly the Sonic and Knuckles game guide... okay, only in that guide) he was depicted as being Jamaican for reasons that elude me.

I've been assuming in all this that we're talking about games where the primary protagonist is black, and not counting supporting characters or a multitude of choosable characters. Otherwise that list of black males would be waaaay longer because having a surly or stoic black friend to accompany your white lead is pretty common, to say nothing of the fact that nearly every fighting game has an obligatory black character:

Final Fantasy 7 (Barret)
Halo (Avery Johnson)
Damn near every fighting game ever
Left 4 Dead (Louis)
Half-Life (if you count Alex and Eli Vance)
Robin Hood (the old NES movie tie-in has segments where you play as Morgan Freeman's Azeem)
Team Fortress 2 (The Demolitions Man)
etc. etc. ad nauseum etc.

It would be pretty awesome if every character in Eternal Darkness was Black.

FF13 had one (Sazh Katsroy).

I think one of the selectable characters in Dead Island was black.

Oh, Civilization has a number of black leaders you can play as.

Why is this list being made?

CEO Nwabudike Morgan, one of the faction leaders from Alpha Centauri.

GTA 5. There are 3 playable "protagonists", but you start with Franklin, and it's his final choice how the end plays out.

Prak_Anima wrote:I think one of the selectable characters in Dead Island was black.

Oh, Civilization has a number of black leaders you can play as.

Speaking of the zompocalypse genre, L4D2 enforces a team dynamic and has a 50% black cast, as is fitting given the game takes place in Georgia and Louisiana.

Shrapnel wrote:Do games where you can customize your character count? 'Cause if so, then you can add every TES game, Fallout 3 and NV, Soul Caliber, Dragon Quest IX...

I wouldn't really say so. For various reasons, but the stand-out one is whether it actually lets you look like a Black person. There are games where you can specifically choose a (preset) character type that has a Black phenotype, sure, but many customization-based character generators fail to really allow you an option to make your character look like a black person. You wind up getting a Caucasian with dark skin instead of Nubian facial features, and it just looks odd, frankly. I mean, there's lots of different variations on that appearance, of course, so it's not like it's always wildly incorrect, but any solution that boils down to "you can fiddle with your skin tone's RGB" is usually unsatisfactory in producing most ranges of what Black people look like.

Fallout 3/NV has customization-based black dudes and dudettes that look black: Each "race" is literally a different race (mechanically), with each having different facial meshes and skeletons. So you can have a black guy who looks black.

But that's the only one I can really think of off the top of my head.

Speaking of character customization, I'm still kinda bitter that the Saints Row franchise started trumpeting how they were going to have even more and better character options in the third game... and promptly cut the Spanish speaking voice actor.

You guys seem to have forgotten the greatest fighting game ever made -- Divekick!

The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard

"Redguard" being the literal in-universe term for "black dude," ofc.

Eikre wrote:The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard

"Redguard" being the literal in-universe term for "black dude," ofc.

I considered adding that, but taking a look at Reguard he seems more like an Arab than a Black Dude. Then I found some internet discussion about how Redguard identity shifted from arabic to Black within the last few games.

Cyrus is totally a badass black dude.

You know, it just came up in the Fallout fandom on Tumblr that no matter what "race" you pick in chargen, in Fallout 3 your mom is African-American and your dad is Liam Neeson. So the Lone Wandererer is PoC, for what it's worth.