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- Great article! Would love to see a remaster of the 2004 version. I’ve not played anything else that scratched that same itch. If mods are available that already do that id be interested to hear about it. I’ve only played on the disc version.
- I absolutely miss this era of gaming, when mechanics and genres weren't yet fully set in stone and the different layers of games interacted in creative ways. I don't think there's a collective hole in the memory of that era, though. These games are rightfully considered classics, whether they worked well (like Pirates!) or were a bit of a mess (like Covert Action).
Personally, I'd love to see this type of game design revived, with modern quality-of-life sensibilities and a better understanding of game mechanics. In fact, shameless plug: for the past four years, I've been building Trucker 2056 (https://trucker2056.com/), a game very heavily inspired by the early MicroProse/Origin games and aimed specifically at the crowd who loved (and still loves) the games of that era.
by rintakumpu - I spent my entire 8th grade summer vacation playing Sid Meier's Pirates. In many ways I considering it one the best games on the C64 (along with Ultima V, Uridium, Arkanoid, Ghost Busters and Ghost and Goblins). The thing that blew my mind was the game was actually written mostly in C64 BASIC with only the screen scrolling and sword fighting sprite routines in 6502 assembler which were called using SYS commands. In fact you could force a hard break and the game would dump you out to the C64 command prompt. If you typed list you could actually see the BASIC source code.
The first line of the code was actually:
0 REM PIRATES OF THE SPANISH MAIN!!
I spent the rest of the summer getting a dump of the game and really deep diving into how it worked internally. Those were the days!
by vparikh - Don't forget to mention its art director, Michael Haire, for all those memorable visuals.
https://spillhistorie.no/2025/01/17/qas-with-michael-haire-f...
https://www.coroflot.com/mhaire/Computer-Games
I'm just learning this myself:
"My favorite version artistically is Pirates Gold where I was able to style the graphics after classic illustrators like N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle."
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26862/26862-h/26862-h.htm
N.C. Wyeth's illustrations for Treasure Island: https://www.nocloo.com/n-c-wyeth-treasure-island-1911/
by esafak - I love that Meier's memoir is titled: "Sid Meier's Memoir!"
(Although remapradio's login system isn't working for me - it uses a magic link, which brings me to a logged-in https://remap.memberful.com/account page, but on remapradio.com I still show as logged out even on hard refresh - Chromium, no ad blocker.)
by no-name-here - What a great read. Thanks for posting this!
> Pirates essentially changed the studio's whole identity, something that was incredibly hard to do even in those days.
There are indeed very few examples I can recall of a game that completely changed a studio, but one that comes to mind is Worms. Team 17 mostly made top down shooters and fighting games, until they released a silly trajectory shooting game inspired by the ancient basic game, Gorilla. That was such a massive success they mostly only made Worms games after that
by trencedamp - Pirates! is a fantastic game. What I find fascinating is that some games like Diablo, Dunes II or Doom spawned a whole genera, while other fantastic games could not find a worthy successor. I'm thinking about Syndicate, Lemmings, Defender of the Crown or North & South (god the laughs!), and many others.by roselan
- Unrelated to the article itself: The login-wall on some random website I've never even seen before feels mildly disrespectful of my time. Kind of similar in vibe to making you download an app to order in a restaurant.by Dilettante_