Like many classic heroes, your Pirates! character hails from nondescript beginnings: an 18-year-old whose family was placed in bondage to Marquis de la Montalban after they couldn’t repay a debt. As a child, you escaped when Montalban’s men arrived, and now you find yourself at the helm of a sloop aptly named Revenge, sailing the Caribbean Sea from Barbados to Vera Cruz in search of your enslaved family members.

En Garde! Swiftly execute your moves to defeat the other captain.

Along the way, you’ll win battles against enemy ships and add them to your fleet (or sink them), along with their treasure, goods, and crew. Your status grows with each victory, and eventually you’ll take on the nine famous buccaneers in the game — including the infamous Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and Captain Kidd — moving your way up the Top 10 Pirates list as you defeat them.

“Errol Flynn, Johnny Depp, and maybe just a little bit of Jackie Chan — they definitely influenced the central pirate character,” Caudill remarks.

“Sid Meier’s games have always made the player the central figure and offered them a chance to do or be something great.”

- Barry Caudill, executive producer, Firaxis Games

The Finest Fleet in the Caribbean. After you defeat a ship, you can sink it or add it to your collection.

A Unique Approach

While a game like Pirates! is steeped in historical and cultural reference points, however, research isn’t front-and-center when Meier, Caudill, and their team embark on a new game. “We have a unique approach at Firaxis,” Caudill observes. “We do the research after we design the game. We do that for several reasons. First, the game is our main concern and all the research in the world won’t define the fun, so we do the research to support the game and fill in the blanks.”

He adds: “Second, when you spend a lot of time researching, you end up making a game that requires the player to have read the same books used in the research in order to understand that game, which can greatly limit the audience. Our goal is to make a fun game that anyone can pick up and play, and maybe they’ll end up learning a little something in the process, if they aren’t careful.”

To Win Her Hand. Impress a governor’s daughter and you could learn an important key secret or two.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Pirates

You begin your adventures aligned with the Spanish, Dutch, French, or English, each of whom are at war with one or more of the others. (Since you’re a pirate, you can change your allegiance any time you want, of course.) Visit the many cities and settlements dotting the Caribbean to repair and upgrade your vessels, buy and sell food and other goods, and meet with the local Governor, who may bestow promotions on you for attacking his enemies and undertaking missions for him. His daughter could impart vital information or even agree to marriage, if you impress her enough.

Don’t forget to visit the tavern, where you recruit new crew members, learn rumors from the barmaid and bartender, and visit with a mysterious traveler who offers to sell you rare objects, fragments of treasure maps, or stories about lost cities. If someone else is talking to the barmaid when you arrive, however, you’ll need to defeat him in a duel before you can talk to her.

“You get a little action, a little romance, a little strategy — it keeps the ‘I’m starring in a pirate movie’ feeling going from start to finish.”

- Barry Caudill, executive producer, Firaxis Games

Swordfighting is one of several mini-games in Pirates!; you must master it if you want to board other ships and defeat their captains, including members of the Top 10 Pirates list. During your voyages, other mini-games involve: fighting land battles to capture towns; sneaking into towns that have barred entry; and even dancing with Governors’ daughters to curry their favor.

Nothing Says “Patriot” Like a Land Battle. Score points with your allied nation by installing a new governor in a defeated town.

“Dancing first came up at one of our design meetings when we were talking about how to make wooing the daughters more interesting,” Caudill recalls. “One of the guys lightheartedly suggested that it should be a rhythm game. Sid ran with the idea and came to the next meeting with the first prototype of the dance game, set to classical music. It was immediately a hit with the guys, and it required lots of work to find ways to give the player subtle visual cues so they knew what to do next.”

Improving on the Original

The mini-games in Pirates! bring action and adventure elements into the mix, making it more than simply a strategy game. Meier took the same approach when he created the 1987 game that bore the same name, notes Caudill: “When Sid made the original Pirates!, he took a risk combining so many genres in one game and it really paid off. We stayed with that design in the new version because it lets players experience many different gameplay styles in one.”

Where There’s a Pirate, There’s a Way. If a town won’t let you in, make your own elusive entrance.

Caudill says that many fans of the original, including himself, had requested a remake, and Meier “was very happy to revisit Pirates! because the technology had advanced so far in the intervening years that he felt he could finally do all the things with the presentation that weren’t possible in the original version. In 1987 on the Commodore 64, you had to leave a lot up to the imagination, but fast-forward to the present day and all of a sudden you have a lush, living 3D world just waiting for some crafty swashbuckler to exploit it.”

He sums it up thus: “The open-ended nature of the game, combined with the mix of genres, makes Pirates! a one-of-a-kind game. You get a little action, a little romance, a little strategy — it keeps the ‘I’m starring in a pirate movie’ feeling going from start to finish.”

If you liked this game, check out:

• Age of Empires III
• Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs
• Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties
• Imperial Glory
• Pirates of the Caribbean Online
• Tropico 2: Pirate Cove
• Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates