The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates

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

kolmogorov

I spent so many hours playing pirates! on my c64. It was absolutely amazing .

shevy-java

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.

jjav

Pirates was a great game, spent so much time on it (PC version) in 89-90

shoo

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-...

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.)

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.

palad1n

Anybody remember the anti-piracy “feature” on this game?

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.

cubefox

> 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.

ndr42

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.

mhrmsn

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

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.

christkv

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.

morsch

See also https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/pirates/

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.

jpadkins

I played Pirates! as recently as 2022. Definitely not lost treasure for me.

esafak

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/

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…