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More about Sid Meier's Pirates! (from Wikipedia):
Sid Meier's Pirates! is a video game created by Sid Meier for the Commodore 64 published by MicroProse in May 1987, and followed by versions for several other platforms. It was the first game to include the name "Sid Meier" in its title as an effort by MicroProse to attract fans of Meier's earlier games, most of which were combat vehicle simulation video games. The game is a simulation of the life of a pirate, a privateer, or a pirate hunter in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was widely ported to other systems.
Pirates! is set in the Caribbean. The Pirates! playing field includes the Spanish Main (namely the northern coast of South America), Central America and the Yucatán Peninsula, the entire Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and all Caribbean islands, plus Bermuda in the PC version. The player is free to sail to any part of the above-mentioned lands, stopped by an invisible barrier southeast of Trinidad, all the way north to just northeast of Bermuda.
The Pirates! Gold remake, with minor improvements and better graphics, was released in 1993. An enhanced remake, also named Sid Meier's Pirates!, was released in 2004. Versions for mobile devices have also been released.
Development
In early 1986, Meier and fellow MicroProse designer Arnold Hendrick wanted to create a role-playing adventure game, but Meier's business partner Bill Stealey was skeptical of producing non-vehicle simulations. With five successful years behind him, Microprose considered star designer Sid Meier a selling point and chose to put his name on the box of his next game, despite a shift away from combat simulators he had become known for. According to Stealey, the idea to add Meier's name came after meeting Robin Williams: "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'".
Meier in his interview said that "Pirates! was actually inspired by a technological trick" when "one of our programmers came up with a cool trick where we could create images, pieces of art, by packing them into a font. And that allowed us to very quickly bring in new pictures". The game is mostly written in Commodore BASIC. Comments in the source code indicate that Meier originally intended to call it Pirates of the Spanish Main!!.
Meier admits that Pirates! was not intended to provide an authentic, true-to-life recreation of historical piracy: "Pirates! was designed more around your fantasy of pirates than the actual reality. That allowed you to bring in all the stuff from the movies, whatever you had read, whatever was in your imagination". MicroProse planned several game elements removed before release, including multiple NPCs per town, more detailed sailing including fleet actions, and a subplot involving religion and nobility.
Ports
The game was widely ported from the original Commodore 64 version, first to the Apple II (1987), then later to IBM PC compatibles (1987), Apple IIGS (1988), Macintosh (1988), Amstrad CPC (1988), Atari ST (1989), Amiga (1990), and Nintendo Entertainment System (1991). The NES port was developed by Rare and published by Ultra Games. Tobacco is replaced as a trade item by "crops" because of Nintendo's family-friendly requirements.
The IBM PC version was originally released in 1987 as a self-booting disk, stored on either two 5¼-inch disks or a single 3½-inch disk. A version for MS-DOS compatible operating systems was released in 1994 on CD-ROM in Europe, edited by Kixx.
Reception
Pirates! was a groundbreaking game in its era. Its puzzles appealed more to female gamers than previous products from MicroProse, a company known for military sims like F-15 Strike Eagle. Although other open-ended games had already been released, the style of player-directed gameplay in Pirates! led it to be the spiritual predecessor of countless others since, both by Sid Meier himself (Civilization, Railroad Tycoon) and many others. The game has sold more than 1 million units worldwide.
Compute!'s Gazette in 1987 praised the detailed gameplay with arcade and strategy, stating that "the designers of Pirates! set themselves a variety of ambitious goals and succeeded on every count". The magazine concluded that the game "is a real treasure". Computer Gaming World said that although reminiscent of The Seven Cities of Gold or Broadsides, "Pirates will prove to be a design with fresh approaches and much historical depth ... intriguing and addicting". The magazine gave Pirates! five stars out of five in a 1990 survey of historical strategy and war games, and four stars in a 1993 survey of pre 20th-century strategy games, calling it "a genre breakthrough, this is a fascinating sim of the Age of Piracy".
Subscribe bit.ly/sub-cgs
#sidmeierspirates #pirates #adventuregames #strategygames
No Commentary
More about Sid Meier's Pirates! (from Wikipedia):
Sid Meier's Pirates! is a video game created by Sid Meier for the Commodore 64 published by MicroProse in May 1987, and followed by versions for several other platforms. It was the first game to include the name "Sid Meier" in its title as an effort by MicroProse to attract fans of Meier's earlier games, most of which were combat vehicle simulation video games. The game is a simulation of the life of a pirate, a privateer, or a pirate hunter in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was widely ported to other systems.
Pirates! is set in the Caribbean. The Pirates! playing field includes the Spanish Main (namely the northern coast of South America), Central America and the Yucatán Peninsula, the entire Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and all Caribbean islands, plus Bermuda in the PC version. The player is free to sail to any part of the above-mentioned lands, stopped by an invisible barrier southeast of Trinidad, all the way north to just northeast of Bermuda.
The Pirates! Gold remake, with minor improvements and better graphics, was released in 1993. An enhanced remake, also named Sid Meier's Pirates!, was released in 2004. Versions for mobile devices have also been released.
Development
In early 1986, Meier and fellow MicroProse designer Arnold Hendrick wanted to create a role-playing adventure game, but Meier's business partner Bill Stealey was skeptical of producing non-vehicle simulations. With five successful years behind him, Microprose considered star designer Sid Meier a selling point and chose to put his name on the box of his next game, despite a shift away from combat simulators he had become known for. According to Stealey, the idea to add Meier's name came after meeting Robin Williams: "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'".
Meier in his interview said that "Pirates! was actually inspired by a technological trick" when "one of our programmers came up with a cool trick where we could create images, pieces of art, by packing them into a font. And that allowed us to very quickly bring in new pictures". The game is mostly written in Commodore BASIC. Comments in the source code indicate that Meier originally intended to call it Pirates of the Spanish Main!!.
Meier admits that Pirates! was not intended to provide an authentic, true-to-life recreation of historical piracy: "Pirates! was designed more around your fantasy of pirates than the actual reality. That allowed you to bring in all the stuff from the movies, whatever you had read, whatever was in your imagination". MicroProse planned several game elements removed before release, including multiple NPCs per town, more detailed sailing including fleet actions, and a subplot involving religion and nobility.
Ports
The game was widely ported from the original Commodore 64 version, first to the Apple II (1987), then later to IBM PC compatibles (1987), Apple IIGS (1988), Macintosh (1988), Amstrad CPC (1988), Atari ST (1989), Amiga (1990), and Nintendo Entertainment System (1991). The NES port was developed by Rare and published by Ultra Games. Tobacco is replaced as a trade item by "crops" because of Nintendo's family-friendly requirements.
The IBM PC version was originally released in 1987 as a self-booting disk, stored on either two 5¼-inch disks or a single 3½-inch disk. A version for MS-DOS compatible operating systems was released in 1994 on CD-ROM in Europe, edited by Kixx.
Reception
Pirates! was a groundbreaking game in its era. Its puzzles appealed more to female gamers than previous products from MicroProse, a company known for military sims like F-15 Strike Eagle. Although other open-ended games had already been released, the style of player-directed gameplay in Pirates! led it to be the spiritual predecessor of countless others since, both by Sid Meier himself (Civilization, Railroad Tycoon) and many others. The game has sold more than 1 million units worldwide.
Compute!'s Gazette in 1987 praised the detailed gameplay with arcade and strategy, stating that "the designers of Pirates! set themselves a variety of ambitious goals and succeeded on every count". The magazine concluded that the game "is a real treasure". Computer Gaming World said that although reminiscent of The Seven Cities of Gold or Broadsides, "Pirates will prove to be a design with fresh approaches and much historical depth ... intriguing and addicting". The magazine gave Pirates! five stars out of five in a 1990 survey of historical strategy and war games, and four stars in a 1993 survey of pre 20th-century strategy games, calling it "a genre breakthrough, this is a fascinating sim of the Age of Piracy".
