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The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates
- trencedamp 2mo agoWhat 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
- krige 2mo agoNitpick: 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.
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoYeah Worms was coded on Amiga computers in a part of the world that was extremely Amiga heavy so it’s unlikely Gorillas.bas is the reference point.
- a96 2mo agohttps://www.lemonamiga.com/game/tanx https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/tanx 1991 is what came to mind for me.
- somat 2mo agoScorched Earth always comes to mind as an influential early artillery game, but it too was PC, so hard to say. I actually remember it's stupid tagline better than the name, "The mother of all games" indeed. But that is what I was searching for to get the name.
- krige 2mo agoAt least some reviews for Worms mentioned Scorched Earth (in superlatives too). It was big enough that systems that didn't have it, wish they had it.
- Gareth321 2mo agoWorms 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/ 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.
- CocaKoala 2mo agoThe 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/ https://azhdarchid.com/
- kolmogorov 2mo agoI spent so many hours playing pirates! on my c64. It was absolutely amazing .
- stefs 2mo agosame 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.
- weinzierl 2mo agoHaha, same for me for the language. I grew up in southern Germany, far from the sea, and all the nautical language is just gibberish to me, no matter if in English or German. In the 90s, we had a pretty popular HipHop band from Hamburg (close to the sea, Germany's largest port) with a member called "Schiffmeister"[1] I always assumed "Schiffmeister" was an official German nautical term, but it turned out it isn't and the guy just liked to play Pirates and used the literal translation of "shipmaster" as his pseudonym. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettes_Brot https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettes_Brot
- stefs 2mo agoi'm a fan of fettes brot too. i didn't know that about schiffmeister! ps: austrian here, i'm about as landlubber as possible.
- shevy-java 2mo agoI used to play it quite a bit back when it came out. It was fun trying to build up a fleet without getting smashed by the colonial genocide empire (e. g. British and whoever else had ships). It was a bit too focused only on the pirate theme though; civilization was better. (Colonization had a similar problem as pirates had in that it was too focused on the revolution, so civilization really had the better idea going.) I also used to play e. g. Die Hanse (german, trade-focused); would have been great if Pirates could have integrated more trade-related aspects while keeping the pirate focus too. Modern games seem to just be 3D clones with simplified gameplay, I don't quite understand how people can play these. They seem to have been dumbed down immensely just for the money grab alone.
- card_zero 2mo agoOh, the Hanseatic League game. I played that once. It involved an awful lot of sailing your trading cog up and down the Baltic, apparently in real time. I like games very slow, but this was too much even for my taste. If I had stuck with it I think there would have eventually been fighting to defend a city and perhaps a city-builder aspect?
- hopw_roewur_ne 2mo agoHanse: Die Expedition (1994) - https://www.mobygames.com/game/9273/hanse-die-expedition/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/9273/hanse-die-expedition/ There's also the Patrician series (Patrician 1, 1992, Patrician III 2002) I think you may be referring to: https://www.mobygames.com/game/15367/patrician-iii/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/15367/patrician-iii/ Patrician III starts out as a manual trading game, sailing your trading cogs up and down the Baltic, but then to expand you build industries, and supply goods so the population can expand and create and consume more of your goods, automate trading routes, you can become mayor of your home town, defend it against sieges, and it to a large extent turns into a city builder. You can also send ships to explore and find trade routes to the Mediterranean, and IIRC you can occasionally accidentally discover America. Very cool game.
- rags2riches 2mo ago
- jjav 2mo agoPirates was a great game, spent so much time on it (PC version) in 89-90
- shoo 2mo agosee also: in 2016, Soren Johnson interviewed Sid Meier about his career & the games he designed - there's over 6 hours of discussion with Sid split over 4 podcast episodes: https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-part-1 https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-...
- no-name-here 2mo agoI 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 https://remap.memberful.com/account page, but on remapradio.com I still show as logged out even on hard refresh - Chromium, no ad blocker.)
- weinzierl 2mo agoAt 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.
- no-name-here 2mo agoYep - Pirates is "the first game to be called Sid Meier's Something or Other" - almost all of his subsequent games used that title scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#Games
- kbutler 2mo agoThis is delightful (from that wikipedia page): The first appearance of Meier's name on the retail box of a game was as the credited creator of Formula 1 Racing in 1982. In 1984 Stealey began marketing Meier himself, hoping to attract other developers by promoting him as an auteur; by 1986 MicroProse was using Meier's name and face in advertisements for its games. In 1987, the company released Sid Meier's Pirates!, the first game with Meier's name in the title. He later explained that the inclusion of his name was because Pirates! is very different from the company's earlier titles. Stealey decided that Meier's name would make those who purchased the flight simulators more likely to play the game. Stealey recalled: "We were at dinner at a Software Publishers Association meeting, and Robin Williams was there. And he kept us in stitches for two hours. And he turns to me and says 'Bill, you should put Sid's name on a couple of these boxes, and promote him as the star.' And that's how Sid's name got on Pirates, and Civilization."
- arkensaw 2mo ago
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- Dilettante_ 2mo agoUnrelated 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.
- chrz 2mo agoYeah, and not obvious immediately. Got reading few pages in before hitting that. Seems like very good article but left disgusted
- touwer 2mo agoVery annoying. More and more sites work like that. Not visible at the start. It feels like being scammed a bit
- tanepiper 2mo agoHave to agree - if they asked much sooner that would fit the pattern but this cuts out just as the article gets going... Bit annoying
- llm_nerd 2mo agoI scan to see if there are one of those dickovers, and if there is I check the archive mirror, but in this case it also has the login wall. Eh, click back and move on with life. I am not signing up to every fringe website for one off articles. And from the site's perspective losing me as a reader is no loss to them either, because I'm never coming back, run ad blockers, etc.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sliem 2mo agoYou got to have a paid subscription to read the article. The main output of remap radio is a (number of) podcast(s). The written game criticism articles is an extra.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2mo ago
- palad1n 2mo agoAnybody remember the anti-piracy “feature” on this game?
- mbork_pl 2mo agoYes. Kind of ironic, no?
- raddan 2mo agoYes. Other Sid Meier games had similar copy protection features. F-19 Stealth Fighter had an aircraft identification task that “could only be answered if you had the manual.” I had an official copy of the game but I played it so frequently that I memorized all the aircraft. To this day, I can identify many real aircraft because they appeared in the manual.
- roygbiv2 2mo agoMy father lived in a different part of the country and copied the game for me. He spent I've no idea how long at the photocopier copying that manual for me. I loved that game, mainly because the manual had absorbed his cigar smoke and reminded me of him.
- jghn 2mo ago> To this day, I can identify many real aircraft because they appeared in the manual. Between F19, M1 Tank Platoon, Gunship, the ranger game, Red storm Rising, and Pirates I have so many random tidbit factoids in my head. It's really pretty amazing. Never really got into F15 though, felt to arcade game-y.
- matiou 2mo agoI remember when not answering correctly to the anti-piracy question, the game would still allow you to play but with extra limited features... a fun approach to this problem.
- martijnvds 2mo agoWhen does the silver arrive in Maracaibo? Early or late in the year?
- roselan 2mo agoPirates! 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.
- un0t1f0s0 2mo agoAgreed. Such great games!
- contingencies 2mo agoMike 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.
- CER10TY 2mo agoSatellite Reign was fun. Not sure if I'd call 2015 _recent_ though :)
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoWhat do you mean, that was just a couple of years- oh. Oh dear, I'm getting old.
- contingencies 2mo agoCan confirm :) Feel like a cat: had 9 lives since then.
- flohofwoe 2mo ago> it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO Satellite Reign has been released as a full game, playable from start to finish and it's really excellent (no idea tbh why the Steam reviews are stuck at 'Mixed', kids these days smh...). It takes a bit to get into the 'flow' and discover all the little gameplay details but once you "got it" it's a lot of fun. I usually do a playthrough at least once a year. Also re Pirates: one of my favourite 'strategy' games on the Amiga. The 2004 remake in 3D is fun but the graphics really haven't aged well and the art style wasn't all that great to start with. I'd really like to see a modern 2D Pirates remake with a bit more historical details and fewer gimmicks (e.g. no sword fights and QTE dancing please).
- cubefox 2mo ago> And yet, this entire era of video games feels like a hole that has been carved out of the collective memory of the medium. It is, in truth, a reflection of how niche the computer game market really was in those days; for every Amiga 500 sold, Nintendo sold 23 NESs and 45 Game Boys. This finally explains why on YouTube, 95% of 2D retro game videos are about console games.
- flohofwoe 2mo agoI think the consensus is that Europe was home computer land, while the US and Japan were game console land. Especially the Amiga and Atari ST were much bigger in Europe than the US (mainly in Germany and the UK, and for Atari ST also France).
- criddell 2mo agoI think my favorite game of the 80's was Carrier Command on the Atari ST. I don't know how well it would hold up today if I played it, but at the time I spent many happy afternoons and evenings piloting my carrier around.
- flohofwoe 2mo agoThere's a Carrier Command 2 now, I didn't get too far yet into the game, but it seems to be a nice mix of retro vs modernization: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2...
- swozey 2mo agoI was born mid 80s in Germany to Americans and had the internet and computers as a wee child, moved to America early 90s and felt like I was the only person in my not-California State with a PC until I was in high school in the 98-00s. I don't remember ever not having a computer. I remember my parents healthcare friends being the only people I knew who owned Apples, for imaging hearts etc. I mention not being in California because back then when I was online everybody else online was from California or Europe. I feel like my career would've sped up about 15 years if I had grown up in CA.. But with that said, I'm way older now and I still can count the number of my friends actually into building PCs and what not on one hand. ALL of my friends have always been console gamers. I have a 22 year old Steam account and I think I might have 2 IRL friends on it.
- ndr42 2mo agoIt is one of the games that are timeless as they work for different generations. I played on an Atari ST aged 13 and my sons played the iPad version at about the same age.
- mhrmsn 2mo agoI was a bit too young for the original game but really enjoyed the 2004 remake at the time and wish there was a new version... Are there any similar games out there, with the same gameplay and vibe? I've found a few pirate games that were released in the last years, but they all seemed different
- b3lvedere 2mo agoTo my knowledge unfortunately not really. Pirates! is kind of unique.
- efitz 2mo agoI 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.
- thedrexster 2mo agoOh man, you say that and the synthesized harpsichord just started playing in my head <3
- jdwyah 2mo agoAlso 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.
- slow_typist 2mo agoWith 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.
- christkv 2mo agoThe amount of time I spent with my friend planning our expeditions on the C64, drawing paper maps and marking clues, treasures. The only other game we sank as much time into was Red Storm Rising with one person running the boat on the the keyboard and the other issuing orders.
- morsch 2mo agoSee also https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/pirates/ https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/pirates/
- boaztheostrich 2mo agoGreat 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.
- jpadkins 2mo agoI played Pirates! as recently as 2022. Definitely not lost treasure for me.
- esafak 2mo agoDon't forget to mention its art director, Michael Haire, for all those memorable visuals. https://spillhistorie.no/2025/01/17/qas-with-michael-haire-former-art-director-at-microprose/ https://spillhistorie.no/2025/01/17/qas-with-michael-haire-f... https://www.coroflot.com/mhaire/Computer-Games 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 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/ https://www.nocloo.com/n-c-wyeth-treasure-island-1911/
- Warputin 2mo agoGreat game one of the first I played on a computer with a mouse (Atari ST), and one of the first games I played later when I got an Amiga 500. Later on I modified the games resources, much fun transporting loads of Weed instead of Tobacco :) or maybe RAM chips in today’s world…
- kbutler 2mo agoPlayed the original, and the 2004 remake, and recently re-played the remake. It's available on Steam and GOG - if I remember correctly, the offline installer from GOG makes it easier to add some quality-of-life mods to help it run better on modern computers. This, Civilization, the Wizardry remake, and a few old Ultimas brought back some great memories. I'll have to go play through the Scott Adams Adventures again, too. Wonder if I can get my family engaged in those?
- the_af 2mo agoHow does it feel playing the 2004 remake these days? I remember I loved it and found it better than the original game (heresy, I know!) except the "simlish" they speak drove me nuts. If only the had used English for the voices, it would have been a perfect game. If there was a mod that did that, I would consider buying it in GOG. (Yes, back then I played a pirated copy. Playing pirated Pirates seems fitting!). Then again, maybe I'm looking at it through rose tinted glasses?
- kbutler 2mo agoHad to overcome some crashing issues, but then gameplay was fun (keyboard user), much as I remembered. It was engaging and easy to become absorbed like it was 20 years ago. Music is enjoyable, though limited playlist. Graphics are obviously dated, and my family laughed at the progressively more buxom daughters being described as increasingly beautiful. Definitely a series of mini-games in a trenchcoat, wrapped in a story. It can get repetitive, but I enjoyed playing through it again on a couple of difficulties, and then went looking for additional piratey things.
- the_af 2mo agoSid 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJOjSQ0yv8U [2] https://www.mobygames.com/game/246/sword-of-the-samurai/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/246/sword-of-the-samurai/
- 1shooner 2mo agoSword 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.
- swozey 2mo agoIf you're looking for a modern take (spaceships) I'd highly recommend the little (but huge) indie game Star Sector. Huge modding community. Insanely easy to mod, even on macos. I have a bunch of scifi games that scratch the itch well, although they don't often give you the feeling of being the actual ship captain who walks around towns, tries to seduce governor daughters, etc. Most of them you build a crew and aren't directly roleplaying the captain in the same manner. Star frontier.. I probably have 10-20 games on steam that capture the feel to a point. I can't say that I own any good modern pirate ship games other than Black Flag, and I'm not sure that counts here, I didn't play much of it.
- dclaw 2mo agoThere is a wonderful IRC-based Pirates adaptation called PiratesIRC https://piratesirc.com https://piratesirc.com
- rintakumpu 2mo agoI 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/ 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.
- 7734128 2mo agoWhy are you spreading such hateful garbage? A login wall after spending minutes reading is not acceptable.
- remich 2mo agoI loved this game. One of my favorite memories from being a kid was playing either Pirates or the gold edition remaster on my sega genesis via a cartridge that had a proto-Netflix for games service on it. The cartridge had a coax port on the back that you ran a cable from the cable company into. You got a menu of like 30 games that rotated every month and you could download them to the cartridge to play them. Pirates and the sega version of Shadowrun were the two that I wore out.
- vparikh 2mo agoI 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!