alt Hacker NewsThe Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates
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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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I 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
There is a wonderful IRC-based Pirates adaptation called PiratesIRC https://piratesirc.com
I spent so many hours playing pirates! on my c64. It was absolutely amazing .
Great 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…
It 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.
I played Pirates! as recently as 2022. Definitely not lost treasure for me.
Pirates was a great game, spent so much time on it (PC version) in 89-90
see 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-...
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/
The 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.
If 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.
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.
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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJOjSQ0yv8U
[2] https://www.mobygames.com/game/246/sword-of-the-samurai/
Played 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?
> 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.
I 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.
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.