Sid Meier's Pirates!: the 1987 game that still defies genre
The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates
Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987) blended swordfighting, sailing, and family rescue into a game that still resists genre labels. Designer Nic Tringali calls it 'unstuck in genre,' with mechanics like wind always blowing east and duels that end sea battles. The game modeled silver routes from Potosí and aging pirates, shaping Microprose's identity before PC gaming's mass adoption.
Pirates! feels unstuck in genre, not quite an open-world game or a role-playing game, not only economic strategy or resource management.
- roselan
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.
- trencedamp
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
- no-name-here
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.)
- boaztheostrich
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.
- Dilettante_
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.
- efitz
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.
- jdwyah
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.
- Warputin
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…