Sid Meier's Pirates and the Lost Art of Game Design
The Story
Sid Meier's Pirates, released in 1987, embodies a lost approach to video game design that turned theme into mechanics instead of following an existing genre.
Microprose was known for vehicle simulations and dry wargames when Meier built a Caribbean where the trade winds always blow east, silver travels by mule train from Potosi to the treasure fleet, and a captain's reflexes slow as he ages.
Designers including Soren Johnson of Old World, Tyler Sigman of Darkest Dungeon and Nic Tringali of The Banished Vault credit it as a milestone in open world design because the player was never on rails.
A Polaris survey of 161 game designers ranked Pirates ahead of Mass Effect, Metal Gear, Pokemon and Quake for influence on their own work.
Later games borrowed pieces of it, with Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Sea of Thieves and Skull and Bones all lifting the naval combat while dropping the economics, politics and aging that gave those battles their weight.
The whole era it belonged to, roughly 1982 to 1990 on home computers, has been carved out of gaming's collective memory as the market consolidated around the PC and consoles.
No one has released a true successor, and the design thinking behind it now sits outside what gets taught in classrooms or funded in publisher pitch meetings.
Microprose was known for vehicle simulations and dry wargames when Meier built a Caribbean where the trade winds always blow east, silver travels by mule train from Potosi to the treasure fleet, and a captain's reflexes slow as he ages.
Designers including Soren Johnson of Old World, Tyler Sigman of Darkest Dungeon and Nic Tringali of The Banished Vault credit it as a milestone in open world design because the player was never on rails.
A Polaris survey of 161 game designers ranked Pirates ahead of Mass Effect, Metal Gear, Pokemon and Quake for influence on their own work.
Later games borrowed pieces of it, with Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Sea of Thieves and Skull and Bones all lifting the naval combat while dropping the economics, politics and aging that gave those battles their weight.
The whole era it belonged to, roughly 1982 to 1990 on home computers, has been carved out of gaming's collective memory as the market consolidated around the PC and consoles.
No one has released a true successor, and the design thinking behind it now sits outside what gets taught in classrooms or funded in publisher pitch meetings.
Why It Matters
The cofounder of MicroProse tried to talk his best designer out of building it. Bill Stealey wanted more flight simulators, objected that pirates carried no airplanes, and settled for bolting Sid Meier’s name onto the box so his simulation buyers would follow. Co designer Arnold Hendrick researched Caribbean piracy from 1560 to 1680 and graded the sailing qualities of nine ship types, and the renegade project outsold everything MicroProse shipped in 1987 while collecting two Origins Awards. Stealey defended the simulation brand so fiercely that the brand became Meier, stamped on every box since 1987, per No Dice No Glory and GamesNostalgia.
Go Deeper
Read the original reporting at Remap.
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