Pirates!: The Freedom Sid Meier Found First

MicroProse in 1987 was a company that made flight simulators. F-15 Strike Eagle. Solo Flight. Silent Service, which was a submarine and therefore practically a holiday. It was co-founded by a designer called Sid Meier and a former air force pilot called Bill Stealey, and it sold aircraft to people who wanted aircraft.

Then Meier proposed a game about pirates, and by his own repeated account Stealey took some convincing, because pirates were not a MicroProse product and nobody had asked for them. The compromise, again by the public account, was to put Meier’s name on the box — the first time it happened, and a marketing hedge that turned into one of the most valuable bylines in the industry.

What shipped is a game I have gone back to more often than almost anything else from the C64 years, and every time I go back I find the same thing: it has quietly solved a problem that games costing three hundred million pounds still cannot solve.

Five games in a trench coat

Pirates! runs six systems at once: a sailing sim, a naval combat game, a fencing duel, a light tactical land battle, a trading game and a diplomacy layer. It moves between them without a loading pause or an apology.

You pick a starting year — six of them, running from the Silver Empire of the 1560s to the last decades of the buccaneers — a nationality among the four powers on the Spanish Main, and one special skill: fencing, navigation, gunnery, medicine, or wit and charm. Then you are in the Caribbean with a small ship and a crew who want paying.

That is the entire setup. There is no mission. There is no objective marker. There is a sea, four empires with shifting relationships, a few dozen ports, and whatever it is you decide you are doing.

The genre-blend is the famous part, and it is genuinely impressive that all six systems are fine — none of them is a minigame in the pejorative sense, and none of them is deep enough to be a game on its own. That balance is deliberate and much harder than it looks. The fencing is three attacks and three parries on two vertical planes, weighted by crew numbers and morale, and it lasts about ninety seconds. If it were richer you would resent playing it forty times. If it were thinner you would resent playing it once.

One correction worth making, because it gets repeated constantly: the dance. Everybody remembers the ballroom minigame where you match the governor’s daughter’s steps to a prompt. That is from the 2004 Firaxis remake. The 1987 original has the governor, the daughter, the scene and the flirtation, and no dance. It is a good addition, and it is not what Meier shipped on the C64.

The wind does the arguing

The sailing is where the design shows its flight-sim parentage, and it is the best thing in the game.

You cannot sail into the wind. The wind has a direction, it changes, and your ship’s speed depends on your angle to it. Every ship class trades speed against firepower against cargo against crew capacity, and the trade is real — a sloop will run rings around a galleon and cannot fight one.

So a naval engagement becomes a geometry problem played out over minutes. You are trying to get across their stern with the wind behind you and their guns unable to bear. They are trying to do the same to you. Chain shot cripples their rigging so they cannot manoeuvre; round shot holes the hull; grape thins the crew for the boarding action you intend to win. Every one of those choices costs you the shot you did not take.

The reason this holds up in a way that almost no other 1987 combat system does is that the constraint is physical and legible. You can see the wind. You lose because you were on the wrong side of it, and you know exactly why, and you know what you should have done. There is no dice roll to blame and no stat to grind. It is the same quality that makes Elite’s combat still teachable — the rules are few, visible, and unforgiving.

The towns, and why the map has weather

The land half of the game gets dismissed and it is doing quiet structural work.

Every port belongs to one of the four powers, and the powers are at war or at peace with each other on a schedule you do not control. A Spanish town that welcomed you in 1662 will fire on you in 1664 because England has declared war, and your letter of marque from the English governor has suddenly become the most valuable document you own. Attack the wrong flag at the wrong moment and you are a pirate; attack the same flag two months later and you are a privateer with a promotion coming.

This is a diplomacy layer with about six moving parts, and it produces something genuinely rare: a world with weather. Your relationship to the map keeps changing without your input, so a plan made in one year has to be re-checked in the next. Ports you use for repairs go hostile. Markets you rely on for cargo close. The Caribbean is a system with its own agenda, and you are one small pressure on it.

The town raid is the payoff. You sail in, land your crew, and fight a small tactical battle on a terrain map — pikemen against buccaneers, with the ground and the numbers deciding it. Win and you sack the place, take the loot, and permanently anger a nation. That last clause is what makes it a decision. The gold is immediate; the consequence lasts the rest of your career, and your career has a length.

Getting old is the whole design

Here is the part everyone under-reads.

Pirates! has no fail state. Lose a sea battle and you are captured, and then ransomed or released or press-ganged, and you carry on. Get marooned, and you carry on. Run out of money, and your crew mutinies, and you carry on with a smaller one. The game will not stop you. You cannot lose.

An open world with no fail state and no goals should be soup. It should be the thing that happens to every modern sandbox around hour thirty, where the map is full of icons, nothing you do matters, and you switch it off without noticing you have stopped enjoying it.

Pirates! is saved by a single system: you get old.

Time passes. Seasons pass. You age, and the ageing is not cosmetic. Your reflexes in the duel slow down measurably — the fencing you cruised through at twenty-five becomes a genuine fight at forty-five. Wounds accumulate. Eventually your body makes the argument that it is time to go ashore.

This is a soft timer, and it is the cleverest thing in the game, because it converts infinite freedom into finite freedom, which is the only kind that produces choices. Every voyage you take is a voyage you did not spend on something else. Chasing one of the nine notorious pirates costs you the years you might have spent building a fortune in trade. Buying map fragments off a drunk in a tavern to find a lost relative costs you the promotions you would have earned raiding for your flag. The clock does not threaten you. It just quietly prices everything.

Compare a modern open world, where you have eternity, every activity is available forever, and the only cost of doing anything is real-world minutes. That design cannot generate a meaningful decision, because nothing is ever foregone. Pirates! asks you what you want to have done with a life, and a life is thirty years long.

Retirement as an ending

And then you retire, and the game does the thing that lands.

You divide the plunder — the crew get their shares, which is a lovely last twist of the knife if you have been living on their goodwill — and you go ashore, and Pirates! tells you who you turned out to be. Your final station comes from your wealth, your rank in your chosen nation’s service, the land you were granted, the relatives you found, the treasure you dug up. The results run from a comfortable governorship down to something considerably less dignified.

It is a scoring screen. It works because it is phrased as a biography. You do not get a number; you get an occupation, and a sentence about the rest of your life, and it is entirely a consequence of what you chose to spend your thirty years on.

Games spend enormous effort now on endings that respond to player choice, mostly by branching a cutscene. Meier got a genuinely responsive ending out of a C64 by making the ending a summary of a system you had been living in the whole time. No branches. No flags. Just an honest accounting.

What actually inherited it

Less than you would hope. The genre-blend got copied — every open world since is several systems in a trench coat. The no-fail-state got copied. The soft timer, the thing that makes the other two work, did not.

The closest inheritors are the games that kept the clock. Hunter put an open island under you with real logistics four years later on the Amiga; Frontier: Elite II made time and fuel the actual antagonists of a galaxy-sized sandbox. And M.U.L.E., of all things, shares the deepest DNA: a game with no story whose entire drama is what a finite number of turns costs you.

Meier’s line about a game being a series of interesting decisions is quoted to death, usually by people who have not noticed the load-bearing word is interesting. A decision is interesting when it forecloses something. Pirates! is a machine for foreclosing things, wearing a cutlass.

Where to play it

The C64 original is the one that matters and it is preserved properly; the Amiga and PC conversions are good and slightly less characterful. The 2004 Firaxis remake is a genuinely fine game that adds the dance, tidies the interface, and files off some of the original’s sharper edges — it is the better product and the lesser design.

Start in 1660. Take fencing. Sail badly for an hour until the wind makes sense. Then notice, around your fortieth birthday, that you have started thinking about what you want on the last page.