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  • I spent so many hours playing pirates! on my c64. It was absolutely amazing .
    by kolmogorov
  • same here, on my amiga 500 and later on the PC. i was a kid and barely able to understand what was going on (but that didn't matter that much anyway), my english was absolutely inadequate for the text. i remember pestering my father about the vocabulary: "what does 'squashbuckler' mean? what's 'swashbuckler'? what's 'merchantman' and 'the flying dutchman'?" (the last was actually a misreading of "she's flying dutch colors" when you looked at a dutch ship). the worst was when i got too far north-west and had to sail back into settled territory against the wind, which took ages. something else that stuck in my mind was the soundtrack - iirc mostly händel and bach.

    ps: years later i found the "mount & blade" series (which i too love), which is roughly the same but medieval and on land.

    by stefs
  • Sid Meier's Pirates! was a fantastic game in which I spent a ton of time. I still find it hard to believe it was written mostly in C64 BASIC [1] (I suppose not the dueling scenes though).

    I think everyone who was a gamer back then knows the game, so it's not really a hidden treasure. It may be lost now to modern audiences, though. By the way, I also enjoyed the remake, with one caveat: I absolutely cannot stand the "simlish" language they speak; I understand they did it to aid in localization, but so much is lost with that nonsense... they should have just used subtitled English with pirate-y voices (or Spanish, but I suppose the English-speaking world was their primary audience).

    Another game which is fantastic in a similar sense than Pirates! is MicroProse's "Sword of the Samurai" [2], apparently made after the resounding success of the former. It's probably the most tasteful and "authentic" samurai game ever made. Yes, even more than the Total War series. It chronicled your rise from a lowly no-name samurai, to Hatamoto, to (hopefully) Shogun. It has duels, marriages, rescues and kidnapping, loyalty and betrayal, tactical battles and strategy, and (taking into account its pixelated era), the graphics are really appropriate.

    I often wish for a remake of Sword of the Samurai, but maybe it's best that nobody did a half-assed attempt and botched it.

    ----

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJOjSQ0yv8U

    [2] https://www.mobygames.com/game/246/sword-of-the-samurai/

    by the_af
  • Sword of the Samurai was one of my favorite early childhood games. I think it's balance and structure (similar to Pirates) is part of what makes me shake my head at how uninteresting modern game design is, whenever I check in on what is supposedly state-of-the-art.
    by 1shooner
  • Also not mentioned here was the map. A real physical map and then shooting the sun to get your latitude. I loved this. Being truly lost in a game was wild.
    by jdwyah
  • With the printed map and some game experience you will find your way around pretty easily. What really develops if you play the game multiple times is optimising routes, e.g. by postponing the pickup of a relative until you have another good reason to sail to a remote place. Also you get really allergic to sailing downwind over long distances. Then the speed of the fleet is determined by the slowest ship and damaged ships sail even slower not only in battle. While we enjoyed having fleets with big battleships with lots of storage room as kids and 300+ staff, I prefer a lean and fast approach to my fleet management today, i.e. mostly barques and the occasional frigate. That means to dump a lot of goods because you are out of storage really quickly but is the better approach in the long run.

    Also nowadays I try to avoid fencing like hell since you can get wounded and that costs years of your prospective career.

    Still, pick 'skill of fencing' as a beginner obviously.

    by slow_typist
  • I loved Pirates! and spend so many hours as a teenager playing it. Not mentioned in the article was the soundtrack- it did a great job of keeping you immersed and the sound chips of the day did a good job with the symthesized harpsichord.
    by efitz
  • Oh man, you say that and the synthesized harpsichord just started playing in my head <3
    by thedrexster
  • 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.
    by boaztheostrich
  • 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
  • At the risk of stating the obvious: It is funny because the game was awkwardly titled: "Sid Meier's Pirates!" and this phrase was all over the place.
    by weinzierl
  • 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
  • The author, Bruno Dias, has a blog[1] where he often discusses games and game design, especially from a narrative perspective; he worked as a Narrative Designer for Failbetter, the studio that did the Fallen London/Sunless Seas/Sunless Skies games. I check in on it somewhat regularly, he organizes his thoughts on the topic quite well.

    [1]: https://azhdarchid.com/

    by CocaKoala
  • Worms were such great games. I just had a look at what Team 17 is up to now and [they're doing surprisingly well.](https://www.team17.com/) Some great games in their portfolio.

    Epic also did really well changing with the times. From Jazz Jackrabbit to one of the largest developers in the world.

    by Gareth321
  • Nitpick: not Gorilla.bas; it was the actual OG, Artillery. Prototypes, which used sprites ripped from Lemmings, were even named "Lemartillery".

    And the creative bankrupcy of T17 is a whole another topic. I would rather suggest that they lucked into Worms when Davidson approached them by happenstance, and would not survive otherwise.

    by krige
  • 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
  • I recall playing the hell out of the original Xcom game
    by _joel
  • Was really hopeful https://www.pcworld.com/article/457418/black-annex-is-the-be... would come out. Followed it since the guy posted about it on SomethingAwful a long time ago. No idea what's up with it or him today.

    Very much Syndicate vibes

    by myko
  • North & South is part of a long tradition of Strategic Map plus Tactical Battle wargames that culminated in the all encompassing Total War series.
    by Marazan
  • One Must Fall 2097. Whilst it did get a sequel back in 2003 (Battlegrounds), it was a disaster that couldn't capture the charm of the OG.

    And whilst there are many games in the fighting genre, there's never been any other game like OMF.

    by d3Xt3r
  • Also, nothing quite like the Black & White games has matched what the originals offered.
    by bogzz
  • Mike Diskett, the lead designer of Syndicate Wars, tried to do a Syndicate remake-ish thang called Satellite Reign recently; it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO. Shame: the conceptual foundation seems disproportionately more urgently pertinent for mass-comprehension today.
    by contingencies
  • Syndicate on MS-DOS is the only game I know of to look good with 16 colors on VGA 640x480. The other one would be Gods by Bitmap Brothers also 16 colors but on 320x200 resolution. Great examples of limitations driving amazing outcomes.
    by pan69
  • Sid Meier himself warned about the difficulty of trying to design games tat are multiple games at once, as basically everything in the list other than Lemmings is). His whole "one good game is better than two great ones" argument, as it's difficult to get a good balance of fun for any given player. If someone likes, say, the strategy elements of North & South, but not the battles, or they feel like they want more of one game but they have to do the other, there's some tension there. So you have to make the games be just fun enough, and change just often enough. A really hard problem.

    And this is why it's relatively unlikely to find worthy successors: Making the whole be as good as the sum of its parts is hard enough. Getting to be as good as Pirates, or the best Cinemaware games, where the whole was significantly better than all of the games in isolation, is aiming foolishly high. Which is why, say, the xcom remakes are such a wonder, because they manage to both change the original two minigames underneath, improving them substantially, all while still being balanced.

    by hibikir
  • 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_
  • Very annoying. More and more sites work like that. Not visible at the start. It feels like being scammed a bit
    by touwer
  • I quite liked it actually. I didn't want any more than I got, which I got for free. I would have found a paywall unsatisfactory since then I'd get nothing.
    by arjie