Playable person of color

Games with a playable non-white character are very rare despite the fact that most of the people on the planet are not white. I'm presuming this is related to the fact that a large amount of video games are made by white people. Those few games which have a non-white playable character usually have only a single non-white character in an otherwise all-white cast. Since non-white playable characters are so noteworthy, I have created a category for them on my Wiki. Various gaming databases will have categories for specific non-white protagonists, but they usually focus just on a single ethnic group rather than any non-white people.

In my personal experience, there are even fewer games which feature a playable non-white character than there are games which feature a playable female character.

Definition

The term "non-white" is pretty subjective, so, for the purposes of this site, I consider the playable character to be non-white if they meet one of the two following sets of criteria:

1. If the game's literature unambiguously describes their ethnicity as being non-European even though they're graphically depicted as white. It's not uncommon for artists to use light skin, especially in cartoon or manga form, for characters who wouldn't have light skin in real life. Anime frequently depicts characters with pale skin and rosy cheeks even though they're Japanese. A video game example can be seen in Age of Empires where all of the character graphics in are drawn with white skin, but most of them are described as having various Middle Eastern and Asian ethnicities.
2. If the playable character's heritage is not mentioned in the game, but their skin tone is clearly not white. There are additional stipulations for this. The playable character must be human or very close to human. Aliens and monsters do not count, but fictional humanoids like elves or dwarves and real humanoids like Neanderthals or Denisovans do count. Also, the character's skin color must be a human skin tone. Blue elves or green humans do not count.

Examples

This is a list of games that are important to me which feature non-white playable characters. For the full list, see the category.

Title	Released	Notes
Age of Empires series	1997-10-15	Throughout the series, most of the playable empires are non-white ancient ethnic groups.
Borderlands	2009-10-20	Roland is black.
Civilization series	1991-09-??	Throughout the series, most of the playable civilizations are non-white ancient ethnic groups.
Diablo	1996-12-31	The sorcerer is black.
Left 4 Dead series	2009-11-17	Louis, Coach, and Rochelle are black.
Magic Carpet series	1994-??-??	You play a Middle Eastern character in each game.
Master of Magic	1994-09-??	Raven is North American, Sharee is African, Lo Pan is Chinese, Jafar is Middle Eastern, Tlaloc is South American.
Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra	1991-??-??	Some of the character portraits are non-white.
Street Fighter series	1987-08-30	Most of the characters in the series are non-white.
Tecmo Sports series	1989-02-??	Their various sports games feature real-life athletes, many of which are non-white.
Terraria	2011-05-16	Character creation allows for pretty much any skin color.
Ultima series	1990-06-01	Starting with Ultima VI: The False Prophet, several other games in the Ultima series allow the player to chose a non-white player.

Links

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_video_games - Wikipedia - Race and video games.
• mobygames.com/game-group/protagonist-black - MobyGames - Black Protagonist.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_video_game_characters - Wikipedia - Black video game characters.