Sid Meier's Pirates!
Released in 1987, Sid Meier's masterpiece remains a blueprint for non-linear design. You play a privateer in the Caribbean, and the game blends economic simulation, sword-fighting raids, naval battles, and navigation into one open-ended career. A dynamic map where towns change nationality and ships sail in real time, all squeezed out of 64 KB. The most charming detail: The entire menu system was written in BASIC, on a machine where most commercial games were hand-tuned assembly.
I used to photocopy the in-game map so I could make notes on it. As I found each map fragment, I'd draw the sections onto my paper copy, so in later games I could find family members or treasure much faster. After a while I had a personal atlas of the Caribbean built up from fragments.
That's the kind of game Pirates! is: it hands you a map and quietly expects you to become a cartographer.
Why I play the Amiga version
The C64 original is the historical landmark, but my favorite is the Amiga version. Better presentation, and the ability to split your fleet, which changes how you approach the whole game. I play it on my original A500, upgraded to 1 MB with a second floppy drive, or on WinUAE when I don't feel like swapping floppies.
The game came on two disks, plus a third to save your game, three disks in rotation at all times. That's where the second drive pays off: keep the game disks mounted, swap only the save disk.
Tactics
Read the manual. The 80-page manual is not optional. Once you've studied the sword-fighting animation sequences you can read your opponent's moves and react. You can wear an enemy crew down to one man just by defending, then land the final strike, essential for capturing cities.
Pick health as your special ability. It extends your career and lets you collect more land titles and money.
Exploit the copy protection. The copy-protection screen actually tells you where the treasure fleet and silver train are. Being in that area increases your chances of finding them. Check the date in the menu.
Wait to marry until you have a high title and plenty of land. That's what appeals to the prettiest governor's daughters.
Hunt the family members first. They know where your relatives are, and each holds a piece of the treasure map.
Learn to read the map fragments. They share the same signature details as the game map. Mountains, coastlines, reefs. I got so good at it that eventually a single fragment was enough to find the treasure.
What the map taught me
The side effect of all that photocopying: By spending so much time sailing the Caribbean in a game, I learned the real geography of the region without realizing it. Where the islands sit, which passages run between them, how the coastlines fit. Pirates! taught me real-world geography.
So who says playing games is a waste of time?
A note on the National Geographic detail
There's a nice historical touch on the European box art, too. The ship depicted is the Golden Hinde, the vessel Francis Drake used to circumnavigate the globe starting in 1577. The artwork itself is an almost one-to-one copy of a National Geographic photograph of the Golden Hinde replica, taken by Gordon Gahan and published in the February 1975 issue. Years later I visited that same replica, built in 1973 and then sitting in a dry dock in London. Seeing the real thing gave the game's naval battles a different weight.
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