Soooo....Mass Effect 3

[Kevin]

How about Nintendo's million selling series Nintendogs/cats? How about the newer Xbox Kinectimals? How about Viva Pinata and Viva Pinata 2? How about Kingdom of Keflings 1+2.

Fair enough. The animal training genre is pretty small, but that makes sense. I don't know enough about Viva Piñata to say, nor Kingdom for Keflings. But The Sims predates Black and White - it's not enough to have a "sandbox game where you babysit creatures that have intelligent-yet-stupid AI," because that'd been done before - not least by Peter Molyneux himself, in Populous.

Yeah Populous is more likely to be considered the first real game like that but I think the games Chesspiece_face mentions are more closely tied to Creatures than the Molyneux line.

Though with Nintendogs/cats it could probably be argued that things like that Tamagotchi which was also a 1996 release was the real start of that, especially given that it was created by and for the Japanese culture initially.