Sid Meier's Pirates! (universe)

Sid Meier's Pirates (universe)
Developer(s)	MicroProse Rare (NES)
Publisher(s)	MicroProse Ultra Games Atari Interactive 2K Feral Interactive
Designer(s)	Sid Meier
Genre(s)	Action-Adventure Strategy
Console/platform of origin	Commodore 64
First installment	Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987)
Latest installment	Sid Meier's Pirates! (Remake) (2004)

The Sid Meier's Pirates universe or simply Pirates! (パイレーツ！ Pirates!) refers to the franchise of pirate-themed vehicle and political simulator video games first created by Sid Meier. Sid Meier's Pirates! is an open-ended, historical sandbox game franchise set in the 17th-century Caribbean, where players become a pirate captain to amass wealth and fame by trading, fighting, hunting treasure, and rescuing family members, with their accomplishments determining their retirement status and final rank. The franchise is known for its freedom, allowing players to pursue various goals, interact with different factions, and experience a dynamic world that changes through random events.

Franchise Description

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 famed actor 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.

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.

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.

The game would later receive a remake called Pirates! Gold in 1993, and later another remake also called Sid Meier's Pirates in 2004

Gallery

Gameplay from NES version

Media with elements appearing in the Super Smash Bros. series

Sid Meier's Pirates! (NES)

• Music:
  • The opening of the final boss theme from Donkey Kong Country, featured in the songs "King K. Rool / Ship Deck 2", "Snakey Chantey", and "Gangplank Galleon", is taken from Rare's NES conversion of the game, which was also composed by David Wise.