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.
Sid Meier himself warned about the difficulty of trying to design games tat are multiple games at once, as basically everything in the list other than Lemmings is). His whole "one good game is better than two great ones" argument, as it's difficult to get a good balance of fun for any given player. If someone likes, say, the strategy elements of North & South, but not the battles, or they feel like they want more of one game but they have to do the other, there's some tension there. So you have to make the games be just fun enough, and change just often enough. A really hard problem.
And this is why it's relatively unlikely to find worthy successors: Making the whole be as good as the sum of its parts is hard enough. Getting to be as good as Pirates, or the best Cinemaware games, where the whole was significantly better than all of the games in isolation, is aiming foolishly high. Which is why, say, the xcom remakes are such a wonder, because they manage to both change the original two minigames underneath, improving them substantially, all while still being balanced.
Syndicate on MS-DOS is the only game I know of to look good with 16 colors on VGA 640x480. The other one would be Gods by Bitmap Brothers also 16 colors but on 320x200 resolution. Great examples of limitations driving amazing outcomes.
All of the big Bullfrog games were unique and for some reason never spawned imitators. Populous, Magic Carpet, Theme Park/Hospital, Dungeon Keeper alongside Syndicate
i enjoyed both two point hospital and two point museum. i think i would recommend museum over hospital, but it's close. i didn't play two point campus, and have heard it's the weakest of the three.
two point museum is 33% off and hospital is 75% off right now.
I feel like the limitations are the reason some/most of those games were so good.
Imagine a modern Syndicate remake... it would "have to" be MMO, it would "have to" have character development, as in the stats would go up. It would "have to" be "rogue-like" (ie procedural level generation, no story.)
It's a non-starter. No studio would accept the idea of the game as it is, since the graphics required to be "modern" would need an amount of work that wouldn't mix with the length of the gameplay of the original.
I fondly remember this game and when I was a kid spent a lot of time playing it. I thought it was amazing with the voice acting for the gods and music and gameplay. I agree there was nothing quite like it released after this game. You can still buy it on GOG btw.
I remember playing this game as a child and absolutely loving every tidbit of it... there's never been anything quite like it since, especially nothing with such a banger of a soundtrack.
One of the best parts of the game: Your scowling coach berating you for getting the robot too smashed up and then having to pay for the repairs.
In a c64 emulator, full screen. You can find the .d64 floppy images online. Use a joystick or at least a cheap usb gamepad, the ship to ship fighting is more fun than.
Or if you have a real C64 with a CRT that would be best, but than with some kind of mass storage attached (anything that is faster than a 1541 since the game is so big it has to load before every fight or other activity).
The game can be pretty immersive and playing it through is a multiple hour endeavour.
If in a ship to ship fight, you gotta raise sails first (by moving the joystick up).
Edit: Vice is an emulator packaged in Debian Contrib, but you need the C64 ROM file (easy to find online).
For Syndicate I tried Satellite Reign - it was ~10 years ago, and despite great graphics back then, I was disappointed by the fact you couldn't even drive cars (where it was a possibility in 1993!); bummer!
So if anyone knows a better title - I'd likely give it a try!
EDIT: did a quick search. I played Pirates on the C64 and never heard of the rather recent "Gold" edition for PC. I know where I'm going to spend the next weekend! Thanks for bringing it to my attention <3
Spent the week playing it. The dancing can be turned down once you find a governor's daughter you want to focus on.
The gold edition doesn't have the eras selection and the treasure fleet doesn't exist the same way. Sailing is easier but I became promoted quickly with all countries and could never attack a town. Promotions are easier. Not a edition.
Mike Diskett, the lead designer of Syndicate Wars, tried to do a Syndicate remake-ish thang called Satellite Reign recently; it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO. Shame: the conceptual foundation seems disproportionately more urgently pertinent for mass-comprehension today.
> it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO
Satellite Reign has been released as a full game, playable from start to finish and it's really excellent (no idea tbh why the Steam reviews are stuck at 'Mixed', kids these days smh...). It takes a bit to get into the 'flow' and discover all the little gameplay details but once you "got it" it's a lot of fun. I usually do a playthrough at least once a year.
Also re Pirates: one of my favourite 'strategy' games on the Amiga. The 2004 remake in 3D is fun but the graphics really haven't aged well and the art style wasn't all that great to start with.
I'd really like to see a modern 2D Pirates remake with a bit more historical details and fewer gimmicks (e.g. no sword fights and QTE dancing please).
Satellite Reign is amazing, but it was released prematurely. The optimization is horrible such that you'll often struggle to hit 60FPS even on modern hardware, let alone what it must have run like when it was new, some achievements are broken, and there's bugs abounds - like getting stuck in geometry. There's some fan mods that tried to fix stuff but I think these sort of things really push people away. The entire concept of how the game works is also not well explained in the tutorial.
I'd still rate the game a 7/10 because it's so absurdly fun if you can get passed all of this, but it's easy to see how it probably never reached even a fraction of its potential market.
What are the kind of details that emerge in satellite reign?
I was a kickstarter supporter, having played syndicate in childhood, but remember bouncing about 1-2hrs in, mostly because it felt bland, but would love to hear if the world and action becomes more involved :).
I like how each city district can be systematically dismantled, you usually start 'raiding' the police- and drone-stations, which decreases surveillance and increases reaction time for reinforcements in later mission in the same district. For the bigger missions you'll first scout the area for alternative entry points which best match your team's abilities. Is a stealthy approach better or do you go in guns blazing, where will you position your sniper for the best effect? Sometimes you need to escort a civilian in or out, which completely changes the typical approach.
And within a mission you always need to maintain 'tactical awareness', always have an escape route in mind, scout ahead for guard routes and schedules, hack doors and cameras, select the best approach to tackle a specific type of guard or robot. And then of course no mission goes as planned, your team gets pinned down and you need to fight your way out or find a place to hide until the alarm level cools down.
Also depending on the approach you choose for a specific mission you may need to change your team's equipment and cyberware before entering the mission area, or maybe you decide that it's better to first raid the military barracks of the district, hoping to get some new weapon and cyberware blueprints. Or you spend some downtime looking for scientists to hijack (which increase research rate for blueprints), or look for new random people in the streets with better attributes for cloning. Or running low on money maybe it's better to first rob the district bank. Each new district is harder than the last, and during the entire game you're essentially preparing for the final confrontation with the main baddy.
For a relatively small indie game there's a lot of 'gameplay density', I can understand though that the game may feel repetivite, but especially starting to tackle a new district may quickly feel like routine, but that initial routine only exists as preparation for the two or three main mission areas in the district, and those are the 'meat' of the game.
> 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
Nitpick: not Gorilla.bas; it was the actual OG, Artillery. Prototypes, which used sprites ripped from Lemmings, were even named "Lemartillery".
And the creative bankrupcy of T17 is a whole another topic. I would rather suggest that they lucked into Worms when Davidson approached them by happenstance, and would not survive otherwise.
Worms were such great games. I just had a look at what Team 17 is up to now and [they're doing surprisingly well.](https://www.team17.com/) Some great games in their portfolio.
Epic also did really well changing with the times. From Jazz Jackrabbit to one of the largest developers in the world.
The author, Bruno Dias, has a blog[1] where he often discusses games and game design, especially from a narrative perspective; he worked as a Narrative Designer for Failbetter, the studio that did the Fallen London/Sunless Seas/Sunless Skies games. I check in on it somewhat regularly, he organizes his thoughts on the topic quite well.
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.)
Yep - Pirates is "the first game to be called Sid Meier's Something or Other" - almost all of his subsequent games used that title scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#Games
Im recently intrigued by Solo Flight, although I havent played it yet. The idea of taking that military flight sim base and just turning it into a casual flying-for-fun game is something that resonates with me. I did love Flight Unlimited which is an obvious spiritual successor
The first appearance of Meier's name on the retail box of a game was as the credited creator of Formula 1 Racing in 1982. In 1984 Stealey began marketing Meier himself, hoping to attract other developers by promoting him as an auteur; by 1986 MicroProse was using Meier's name and face in advertisements for its games. In 1987, the company released Sid Meier's Pirates!, the first game with Meier's name in the title. He later explained that the inclusion of his name was because Pirates! is very different from the company's earlier titles. Stealey decided that Meier's name would make those who purchased the flight simulators more likely to play the game. Stealey recalled: "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.' And that's how Sid's name got on Pirates, and Civilization."
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.
You got to have a paid subscription to read the article. The main output of remap radio is a (number of) podcast(s). The written game criticism articles is an extra.
They claim "By signing up—again, it costs nothing!—you can read the rest". If that's false, that not only a really shitty move but should be a crime - they're obtaining something of value (your e-mail address, no doubt to spam it with subscription ads) under false pretenses.
I scan to see if there are one of those dickovers, and if there is I check the archive mirror, but in this case it also has the login wall.
Eh, click back and move on with life. I am not signing up to every fringe website for one off articles. And from the site's perspective losing me as a reader is no loss to them either, because I'm never coming back, run ad blockers, etc.
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.
With the printed map and some game experience you will find your way around pretty easily. What really develops if you play the game multiple times is optimising routes, e.g. by postponing the pickup of a relative until you have another good reason to sail to a remote place. Also you get really allergic to sailing downwind over long distances. Then the speed of the fleet is determined by the slowest ship and damaged ships sail even slower not only in battle. While we enjoyed having fleets with big battleships with lots of storage room as kids and 300+ staff, I prefer a lean and fast approach to my fleet management today, i.e. mostly barques and the occasional frigate. That means to dump a lot of goods because you are out of storage really quickly but is the better approach in the long run.
Also nowadays I try to avoid fencing like hell since you can get wounded and that costs years of your prospective career.
Still, pick 'skill of fencing' as a beginner obviously.
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
same here, on my amiga 500 and later on the PC. i was a kid and barely able to understand what was going on (but that didn't matter that much anyway), my english was absolutely inadequate for the text. i remember pestering my father about the vocabulary: "what does 'squashbuckler' mean? what's 'swashbuckler'? what's 'merchantman' and 'the flying dutchman'?" (the last was actually a misreading of "she's flying dutch colors" when you looked at a dutch ship).
the worst was when i got too far north-west and had to sail back into settled territory against the wind, which took ages.
something else that stuck in my mind was the soundtrack - iirc mostly händel and bach.
ps: years later i found the "mount & blade" series (which i too love), which is roughly the same but medieval and on land.
I grew up in southern Germany, far from the sea, and all the nautical language is just gibberish to me, no matter if in English or German.
In the 90s, we had a pretty popular HipHop band from Hamburg (close to the sea, Germany's largest port) with a member called "Schiffmeister"[1]
I always assumed "Schiffmeister" was an official German nautical term, but it turned out it isn't and the guy just liked to play Pirates and used the literal translation of "shipmaster" as his pseudonym.
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.
Yes. Other Sid Meier games had similar copy protection features. F-19 Stealth Fighter had an aircraft identification task that “could only be answered if you had the manual.” I had an official copy of the game but I played it so frequently that I memorized all the aircraft. To this day, I can identify many real aircraft because they appeared in the manual.
My father lived in a different part of the country and copied the game for me. He spent I've no idea how long at the photocopier copying that manual for me. I loved that game, mainly because the manual had absorbed his cigar smoke and reminded me of him.
> To this day, I can identify many real aircraft because they appeared in the manual.
Between F19, M1 Tank Platoon, Gunship, the ranger game, Red storm Rising, and Pirates I have so many random tidbit factoids in my head. It's really pretty amazing. Never really got into F15 though, felt to arcade game-y.
I remember when not answering correctly to the anti-piracy question, the game would still allow you to play but with extra limited features... a fun approach to this problem.
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.
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?
How does it feel playing the 2004 remake these days?
I remember I loved it and found it better than the original game (heresy, I know!) except the "simlish" they speak drove me nuts. If only the had used English for the voices, it would have been a perfect game. If there was a mod that did that, I would consider buying it in GOG. (Yes, back then I played a pirated copy. Playing pirated Pirates seems fitting!).
Then again, maybe I'm looking at it through rose tinted glasses?
Had to overcome some crashing issues, but then gameplay was fun (keyboard user), much as I remembered. It was engaging and easy to become absorbed like it was 20 years ago. Music is enjoyable, though limited playlist. Graphics are obviously dated, and my family laughed at the progressively more buxom daughters being described as increasingly beautiful.
Definitely a series of mini-games in a trenchcoat, wrapped in a story. It can get repetitive, but I enjoyed playing through it again on a couple of difficulties, and then went looking for additional piratey things.
> 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 think my favorite game of the 80's was Carrier Command on the Atari ST. I don't know how well it would hold up today if I played it, but at the time I spent many happy afternoons and evenings piloting my carrier around.
I was born mid 80s in Germany to Americans and had the internet and computers as a wee child, moved to America early 90s and felt like I was the only person in my not-California State with a PC until I was in high school in the 98-00s. I don't remember ever not having a computer. I remember my parents healthcare friends being the only people I knew who owned Apples, for imaging hearts etc.
I mention not being in California because back then when I was online everybody else online was from California or Europe. I feel like my career would've sped up about 15 years if I had grown up in CA..
But with that said, I'm way older now and I still can count the number of my friends actually into building PCs and what not on one hand. ALL of my friends have always been console gamers. I have a 22 year old Steam account and I think I might have 2 IRL friends on it.
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.
Oh, the Hanseatic League game. I played that once. It involved an awful lot of sailing your trading cog up and down the Baltic, apparently in real time. I like games very slow, but this was too much even for my taste. If I had stuck with it I think there would have eventually been fighting to defend a city and perhaps a city-builder aspect?
Patrician III starts out as a manual trading game, sailing your trading cogs up and down the Baltic, but then to expand you build industries, and supply goods so the population can expand and create and consume more of your goods, automate trading routes, you can become mayor of your home town, defend it against sieges, and it to a large extent turns into a city builder.
You can also send ships to explore and find trade routes to the Mediterranean, and IIRC you can occasionally accidentally discover America.
I played some of the Patrician games. Loved the start of every game, then became bogged down in managing my growing fleet. I wanted to do so much more but I found the UI lacking.
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.
Sid Meier himself warned about the difficulty of trying to design games tat are multiple games at once, as basically everything in the list other than Lemmings is). His whole "one good game is better than two great ones" argument, as it's difficult to get a good balance of fun for any given player. If someone likes, say, the strategy elements of North & South, but not the battles, or they feel like they want more of one game but they have to do the other, there's some tension there. So you have to make the games be just fun enough, and change just often enough. A really hard problem.
And this is why it's relatively unlikely to find worthy successors: Making the whole be as good as the sum of its parts is hard enough. Getting to be as good as Pirates, or the best Cinemaware games, where the whole was significantly better than all of the games in isolation, is aiming foolishly high. Which is why, say, the xcom remakes are such a wonder, because they manage to both change the original two minigames underneath, improving them substantially, all while still being balanced.
Thanks for that Sid Meier quote: I think this is a really good explanation of why I bounce of Anno games hard and love other similar, more pure, sims!
Syndicate on MS-DOS is the only game I know of to look good with 16 colors on VGA 640x480. The other one would be Gods by Bitmap Brothers also 16 colors but on 320x200 resolution. Great examples of limitations driving amazing outcomes.
All of the big Bullfrog games were unique and for some reason never spawned imitators. Populous, Magic Carpet, Theme Park/Hospital, Dungeon Keeper alongside Syndicate
They definitely are successors to some of those. Two Point Hospital for one.
It never quite recaptured the charm of the original, but that might just be because I’m older.
Is that any good? It came up on my recommended list on Steam for years and has since stopped. I was vaguely interested
i enjoyed both two point hospital and two point museum. i think i would recommend museum over hospital, but it's close. i didn't play two point campus, and have heard it's the weakest of the three.
two point museum is 33% off and hospital is 75% off right now.
Cool thanks!
Man I really miss Populous, the whole feel of that game was just so unique and fantastic.
I lost many hours to Populous II. Being able to rain down lightning was just plain fun.
Four Tribes is a decent iOS clone.
Dungeon Keeper absolutely produced knockoffs. Orcs Must Die, Dungeon Defenders, Dungeons, etc.
For Populous, see https://store.steampowered.com/app/319560/Reprisal_Universe/
It's very much a similar game.
There are plenty of theme park and dungeon sims now. Even Syndicate has a spiritual successor made by former syndicate devs
> Even Syndicate has a spiritual successor made by former syndicate devs
For those who are asking: this successor is Satellite Reign:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Reign
I feel like the limitations are the reason some/most of those games were so good.
Imagine a modern Syndicate remake... it would "have to" be MMO, it would "have to" have character development, as in the stats would go up. It would "have to" be "rogue-like" (ie procedural level generation, no story.)
It's a non-starter. No studio would accept the idea of the game as it is, since the graphics required to be "modern" would need an amount of work that wouldn't mix with the length of the gameplay of the original.
You can sort of play either syndicate or syndicate wars in rimworld with right set of mods. No studios needed.
Satellite Reign is what crap it comes to otherwise. Even though it was kickstarted, the "studio vision" ensured it was stillborn.
Bitmap brothers are also responsible for one of the most underrated RTS games imo: "Z"
Also, nothing quite like the Black & White games has matched what the originals offered.
All (?) of Lionhead Studios are basically classics like that with no true successors, B&W and also The Movies and Fable.
I recall playing the hell out of the original Xcom game
Not sure if there's anything quite like Sacrifice, which to be fair was an interesting blend rather than a wholly unique game play like dune 2.
I fondly remember this game and when I was a kid spent a lot of time playing it. I thought it was amazing with the voice acting for the gods and music and gameplay. I agree there was nothing quite like it released after this game. You can still buy it on GOG btw.
I've been waiting for a successor to Aerobiz: Supersonic. I've played about every airline management sim since then, and nothing scratches the itch.
One Must Fall 2097. Whilst it did get a sequel back in 2003 (Battlegrounds), it was a disaster that couldn't capture the charm of the OG.
And whilst there are many games in the fighting genre, there's never been any other game like OMF.
I remember playing this game as a child and absolutely loving every tidbit of it... there's never been anything quite like it since, especially nothing with such a banger of a soundtrack.
One of the best parts of the game: Your scowling coach berating you for getting the robot too smashed up and then having to pay for the repairs.
that game had such a dope soundtrack!
This?
https://www.zophar.net/music/ms-dos/one-must-fall-2097
Kenny Chou (the OG composer) remade the theme song a few years ago! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvlVaQl7kEk
And DeBisco did a psytrance mix of the Power Plant theme, which is also epic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7C-f2FpNy0
Programmers, who knows what they're doing in there?
What’s the best way to play pirates these days?
In a c64 emulator, full screen. You can find the .d64 floppy images online. Use a joystick or at least a cheap usb gamepad, the ship to ship fighting is more fun than.
Or if you have a real C64 with a CRT that would be best, but than with some kind of mass storage attached (anything that is faster than a 1541 since the game is so big it has to load before every fight or other activity).
The game can be pretty immersive and playing it through is a multiple hour endeavour.
If in a ship to ship fight, you gotta raise sails first (by moving the joystick up).
Edit: Vice is an emulator packaged in Debian Contrib, but you need the C64 ROM file (easy to find online).
"In a browser" is always an option:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sid_Meiers_Pirates_1987
https://archive.org/details/PiratesMacintosh
There are probably others, but Archive.org is misbehaving at the moment.
The Xbox remake from 2004 plays well on current-gen Xboxes.
I played the remake, which was pretty good, though now 20 years old itself.
tbh if you want to scratch the pirate-y itch, Assassin's Creed Black Flag is excellent, if just for the sea shanties.
Which has itself just had a remake released for it I see! I don't keep up with games these days.
The remake is on Steam
gog.com or Xbox backwards compatibility?
Is there another game like Syndicate or Lemmings out there? Seriously, I have been itching to scratch that old itch...
For Syndicate I tried Satellite Reign - it was ~10 years ago, and despite great graphics back then, I was disappointed by the fact you couldn't even drive cars (where it was a possibility in 1993!); bummer!
So if anyone knows a better title - I'd likely give it a try!
There is Syndicate Wars (Succcessor) and Satellite Reign, a spiritual successor from 2015.
My memories are hazy but wasn’t syndicate a squad based action strategy? In which case stuff like Fallout Tactics or Company of Heroes?
> Is there another game like Syndicate or Lemmings out there?
Concerning Lemmings: Gemini listed the following games that are at least similar in spirit:
- Humanity (2023)
- Zombie Night Terror (2016)
- Spirits (2011)
- Craftlings (2026)
There is one I haven't seen listed yet, Lemmings was one of the games I beat very early in life.
Creepers https://www.myabandonware.com/game/creepers-1kj
Had the same feel from what I remember playing it as a kid. Did the link so it wasn't the wrong one from the screenshots.
It has been years since I went though my totes of PC games, so I was glad I had the right name.
I just ported syndicate to the web
https://this.os.isfine.org/#syndicate-plus
With some improvements and, uhm, modernizations https://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgzoeller_i-ported-syndica...?
For games like Lemmings:
Rat Trap/Krusty's Fun House (available on Amiga just like Lemmings)
Chuchu rockets
This is really getting into the weeds, but there is also the Japanese game Bazaru De Gozaru for the PC Engine CD (TurboGrafx 16 CD)
Wow, you just tickled a whole bunch of nostalgia centers in my brain.
Pirates! was a gift from my wife years ago, and I kind disappeared for a couple of weeks. The dancing was tedious though :-)
There was dancing in Pirates?
EDIT: did a quick search. I played Pirates on the C64 and never heard of the rather recent "Gold" edition for PC. I know where I'm going to spend the next weekend! Thanks for bringing it to my attention <3
Spent the week playing it. The dancing can be turned down once you find a governor's daughter you want to focus on.
The gold edition doesn't have the eras selection and the treasure fleet doesn't exist the same way. Sailing is easier but I became promoted quickly with all countries and could never attack a town. Promotions are easier. Not a edition.
Yeah, I was referring to the 3D release in 2004, not the original.
North & South is part of a long tradition of Strategic Map plus Tactical Battle wargames that culminated in the all encompassing Total War series.
Mike Diskett, the lead designer of Syndicate Wars, tried to do a Syndicate remake-ish thang called Satellite Reign recently; it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO. Shame: the conceptual foundation seems disproportionately more urgently pertinent for mass-comprehension today.
I played through Satellite Reign! I remember it being a pretty worthy successor, having also played the original Bullfrog Syndicate.
Unfortunately I think the modern gaming public would be allergic to isometric third person, especially as soon as they encounter visibility issues.
I don't get it about the isometric mode allergy - I personally love such games and feel I'm not the only one.
> it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO
Satellite Reign has been released as a full game, playable from start to finish and it's really excellent (no idea tbh why the Steam reviews are stuck at 'Mixed', kids these days smh...). It takes a bit to get into the 'flow' and discover all the little gameplay details but once you "got it" it's a lot of fun. I usually do a playthrough at least once a year.
Also re Pirates: one of my favourite 'strategy' games on the Amiga. The 2004 remake in 3D is fun but the graphics really haven't aged well and the art style wasn't all that great to start with.
I'd really like to see a modern 2D Pirates remake with a bit more historical details and fewer gimmicks (e.g. no sword fights and QTE dancing please).
Satellite Reign is amazing, but it was released prematurely. The optimization is horrible such that you'll often struggle to hit 60FPS even on modern hardware, let alone what it must have run like when it was new, some achievements are broken, and there's bugs abounds - like getting stuck in geometry. There's some fan mods that tried to fix stuff but I think these sort of things really push people away. The entire concept of how the game works is also not well explained in the tutorial.
I'd still rate the game a 7/10 because it's so absurdly fun if you can get passed all of this, but it's easy to see how it probably never reached even a fraction of its potential market.
What are the kind of details that emerge in satellite reign?
I was a kickstarter supporter, having played syndicate in childhood, but remember bouncing about 1-2hrs in, mostly because it felt bland, but would love to hear if the world and action becomes more involved :).
I like how each city district can be systematically dismantled, you usually start 'raiding' the police- and drone-stations, which decreases surveillance and increases reaction time for reinforcements in later mission in the same district. For the bigger missions you'll first scout the area for alternative entry points which best match your team's abilities. Is a stealthy approach better or do you go in guns blazing, where will you position your sniper for the best effect? Sometimes you need to escort a civilian in or out, which completely changes the typical approach.
And within a mission you always need to maintain 'tactical awareness', always have an escape route in mind, scout ahead for guard routes and schedules, hack doors and cameras, select the best approach to tackle a specific type of guard or robot. And then of course no mission goes as planned, your team gets pinned down and you need to fight your way out or find a place to hide until the alarm level cools down.
Also depending on the approach you choose for a specific mission you may need to change your team's equipment and cyberware before entering the mission area, or maybe you decide that it's better to first raid the military barracks of the district, hoping to get some new weapon and cyberware blueprints. Or you spend some downtime looking for scientists to hijack (which increase research rate for blueprints), or look for new random people in the streets with better attributes for cloning. Or running low on money maybe it's better to first rob the district bank. Each new district is harder than the last, and during the entire game you're essentially preparing for the final confrontation with the main baddy.
For a relatively small indie game there's a lot of 'gameplay density', I can understand though that the game may feel repetivite, but especially starting to tackle a new district may quickly feel like routine, but that initial routine only exists as preparation for the two or three main mission areas in the district, and those are the 'meat' of the game.
Satellite Reign was fun. Not sure if I'd call 2015 _recent_ though :)
Agreed. Such great games!
Was really hopeful https://www.pcworld.com/article/457418/black-annex-is-the-be... would come out. Followed it since the guy posted about it on SomethingAwful a long time ago. No idea what's up with it or him today.
Very much Syndicate vibes
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
Nitpick: not Gorilla.bas; it was the actual OG, Artillery. Prototypes, which used sprites ripped from Lemmings, were even named "Lemartillery".
And the creative bankrupcy of T17 is a whole another topic. I would rather suggest that they lucked into Worms when Davidson approached them by happenstance, and would not survive otherwise.
Scorched Earth always comes to mind as an influential early artillery game, but it too was PC, so hard to say.
I actually remember it's stupid tagline better than the name, "The mother of all games" indeed. But that is what I was searching for to get the name.
At least some reviews for Worms mentioned Scorched Earth (in superlatives too). It was big enough that systems that didn't have it, wish they had it.
Yeah Worms was coded on Amiga computers in a part of the world that was extremely Amiga heavy so it’s unlikely Gorillas.bas is the reference point.
https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/tanx 1991 is what came to mind for me.
Worms were such great games. I just had a look at what Team 17 is up to now and [they're doing surprisingly well.](https://www.team17.com/) Some great games in their portfolio.
Epic also did really well changing with the times. From Jazz Jackrabbit to one of the largest developers in the world.
Also remember the guys who made Commander Keen.
Yeah, did they ever go on to do anything else?
:-D
They worked on one thing forever
The author, Bruno Dias, has a blog[1] where he often discusses games and game design, especially from a narrative perspective; he worked as a Narrative Designer for Failbetter, the studio that did the Fallen London/Sunless Seas/Sunless Skies games. I check in on it somewhat regularly, he organizes his thoughts on the topic quite well.
[1]: https://azhdarchid.com/
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.)
At the risk of stating the obvious: It is funny because the game was awkwardly titled: "Sid Meier's Pirates!" and this phrase was all over the place.
Yep - Pirates is "the first game to be called Sid Meier's Something or Other" - almost all of his subsequent games used that title scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#Games
Im recently intrigued by Solo Flight, although I havent played it yet. The idea of taking that military flight sim base and just turning it into a casual flying-for-fun game is something that resonates with me. I did love Flight Unlimited which is an obvious spiritual successor
This is delightful (from that wikipedia page):
The first appearance of Meier's name on the retail box of a game was as the credited creator of Formula 1 Racing in 1982. In 1984 Stealey began marketing Meier himself, hoping to attract other developers by promoting him as an auteur; by 1986 MicroProse was using Meier's name and face in advertisements for its games. In 1987, the company released Sid Meier's Pirates!, the first game with Meier's name in the title. He later explained that the inclusion of his name was because Pirates! is very different from the company's earlier titles. Stealey decided that Meier's name would make those who purchased the flight simulators more likely to play the game. Stealey recalled: "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.' And that's how Sid's name got on Pirates, and Civilization."
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.
Have to agree - if they asked much sooner that would fit the pattern but this cuts out just as the article gets going... Bit annoying
You got to have a paid subscription to read the article. The main output of remap radio is a (number of) podcast(s). The written game criticism articles is an extra.
They claim "By signing up—again, it costs nothing!—you can read the rest". If that's false, that not only a really shitty move but should be a crime - they're obtaining something of value (your e-mail address, no doubt to spam it with subscription ads) under false pretenses.
Yeah, and not obvious immediately. Got reading few pages in before hitting that. Seems like very good article but left disgusted
Very annoying. More and more sites work like that. Not visible at the start. It feels like being scammed a bit
I scan to see if there are one of those dickovers, and if there is I check the archive mirror, but in this case it also has the login wall.
Eh, click back and move on with life. I am not signing up to every fringe website for one off articles. And from the site's perspective losing me as a reader is no loss to them either, because I'm never coming back, run ad blockers, etc.
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.
With the printed map and some game experience you will find your way around pretty easily. What really develops if you play the game multiple times is optimising routes, e.g. by postponing the pickup of a relative until you have another good reason to sail to a remote place. Also you get really allergic to sailing downwind over long distances. Then the speed of the fleet is determined by the slowest ship and damaged ships sail even slower not only in battle. While we enjoyed having fleets with big battleships with lots of storage room as kids and 300+ staff, I prefer a lean and fast approach to my fleet management today, i.e. mostly barques and the occasional frigate. That means to dump a lot of goods because you are out of storage really quickly but is the better approach in the long run.
Also nowadays I try to avoid fencing like hell since you can get wounded and that costs years of your prospective career.
Still, pick 'skill of fencing' as a beginner obviously.
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
To my knowledge unfortunately not really. Pirates! is kind of unique.
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 .
same here, on my amiga 500 and later on the PC. i was a kid and barely able to understand what was going on (but that didn't matter that much anyway), my english was absolutely inadequate for the text. i remember pestering my father about the vocabulary: "what does 'squashbuckler' mean? what's 'swashbuckler'? what's 'merchantman' and 'the flying dutchman'?" (the last was actually a misreading of "she's flying dutch colors" when you looked at a dutch ship). the worst was when i got too far north-west and had to sail back into settled territory against the wind, which took ages. something else that stuck in my mind was the soundtrack - iirc mostly händel and bach.
ps: years later i found the "mount & blade" series (which i too love), which is roughly the same but medieval and on land.
Haha, same for me for the language.
I grew up in southern Germany, far from the sea, and all the nautical language is just gibberish to me, no matter if in English or German.
In the 90s, we had a pretty popular HipHop band from Hamburg (close to the sea, Germany's largest port) with a member called "Schiffmeister"[1]
I always assumed "Schiffmeister" was an official German nautical term, but it turned out it isn't and the guy just liked to play Pirates and used the literal translation of "shipmaster" as his pseudonym.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettes_Brot
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 https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/pirates/
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/
Anybody remember the anti-piracy “feature” on this game?
Yes. Other Sid Meier games had similar copy protection features. F-19 Stealth Fighter had an aircraft identification task that “could only be answered if you had the manual.” I had an official copy of the game but I played it so frequently that I memorized all the aircraft. To this day, I can identify many real aircraft because they appeared in the manual.
My father lived in a different part of the country and copied the game for me. He spent I've no idea how long at the photocopier copying that manual for me. I loved that game, mainly because the manual had absorbed his cigar smoke and reminded me of him.
> To this day, I can identify many real aircraft because they appeared in the manual.
Between F19, M1 Tank Platoon, Gunship, the ranger game, Red storm Rising, and Pirates I have so many random tidbit factoids in my head. It's really pretty amazing. Never really got into F15 though, felt to arcade game-y.
When does the silver arrive in Maracaibo? Early or late in the year?
I remember when not answering correctly to the anti-piracy question, the game would still allow you to play but with extra limited features... a fun approach to this problem.
Yes. Kind of ironic, no?
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.
----
[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?
How does it feel playing the 2004 remake these days?
I remember I loved it and found it better than the original game (heresy, I know!) except the "simlish" they speak drove me nuts. If only the had used English for the voices, it would have been a perfect game. If there was a mod that did that, I would consider buying it in GOG. (Yes, back then I played a pirated copy. Playing pirated Pirates seems fitting!).
Then again, maybe I'm looking at it through rose tinted glasses?
Had to overcome some crashing issues, but then gameplay was fun (keyboard user), much as I remembered. It was engaging and easy to become absorbed like it was 20 years ago. Music is enjoyable, though limited playlist. Graphics are obviously dated, and my family laughed at the progressively more buxom daughters being described as increasingly beautiful.
Definitely a series of mini-games in a trenchcoat, wrapped in a story. It can get repetitive, but I enjoyed playing through it again on a couple of difficulties, and then went looking for additional piratey things.
> 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 think the consensus is that Europe was home computer land, while the US and Japan were game console land.
Especially the Amiga and Atari ST were much bigger in Europe than the US (mainly in Germany and the UK, and for Atari ST also France).
I think my favorite game of the 80's was Carrier Command on the Atari ST. I don't know how well it would hold up today if I played it, but at the time I spent many happy afternoons and evenings piloting my carrier around.
There's a Carrier Command 2 now, I didn't get too far yet into the game, but it seems to be a nice mix of retro vs modernization:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2...
I was born mid 80s in Germany to Americans and had the internet and computers as a wee child, moved to America early 90s and felt like I was the only person in my not-California State with a PC until I was in high school in the 98-00s. I don't remember ever not having a computer. I remember my parents healthcare friends being the only people I knew who owned Apples, for imaging hearts etc.
I mention not being in California because back then when I was online everybody else online was from California or Europe. I feel like my career would've sped up about 15 years if I had grown up in CA..
But with that said, I'm way older now and I still can count the number of my friends actually into building PCs and what not on one hand. ALL of my friends have always been console gamers. I have a 22 year old Steam account and I think I might have 2 IRL friends on it.
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.
Oh, the Hanseatic League game. I played that once. It involved an awful lot of sailing your trading cog up and down the Baltic, apparently in real time. I like games very slow, but this was too much even for my taste. If I had stuck with it I think there would have eventually been fighting to defend a city and perhaps a city-builder aspect?
Hanse: Die Expedition (1994) - https://www.mobygames.com/game/9273/hanse-die-expedition/
There's also the Patrician series (Patrician 1, 1992, Patrician III 2002) I think you may be referring to: https://www.mobygames.com/game/15367/patrician-iii/
Patrician III starts out as a manual trading game, sailing your trading cogs up and down the Baltic, but then to expand you build industries, and supply goods so the population can expand and create and consume more of your goods, automate trading routes, you can become mayor of your home town, defend it against sieges, and it to a large extent turns into a city builder.
You can also send ships to explore and find trade routes to the Mediterranean, and IIRC you can occasionally accidentally discover America.
Very cool game.
I played some of the Patrician games. Loved the start of every game, then became bogged down in managing my growing fleet. I wanted to do so much more but I found the UI lacking.