Pirates!

Pirates! is an open-world action-adventure with strategy elements by Sid Meier, published by MicroProse, which also came out for the Atari 800/XL/XE. The player takes on the role of a Caribbean pirate in the colonial era and works their way up from a petty thief to a legendary sea dog or even a viceroy. The game combines naval battles presented as side-view action, in which ships fire broadsides at each other and you need to maneuver with respect to the wind, with land-based swordfights that play out as a simple arcade minigame, and with a map layer where the player plans routes between ports, trades goods, recruits crew, and raids settlements. It also includes dancing with the governor's daughter, negotiating ransom for captives, or searching for lost family members using clues from maps, which gives the game a light adventure dimension beyond pure strategy.

On the eight-bit Atari, the game runs smoothly and uses simple, clear graphics that, despite hardware limitations, evoke the atmosphere of the seventeenth-century Caribbean well, from colorful port maps to combat animations. The music and sound are sparing but functional, and the main weight of the atmosphere is carried by the text descriptions and the visual style of the individual screens. Progress through the game is non-linear; the player chooses on their own whether to build reputation with one of the colonial powers, search for lost family, or amass treasure, which was an unusually open approach to design in the mid-1980s. As the character ages, the reflexes needed for combat also decline, so the game subtly nudges the player toward cashing in their career in time and settling down.

Pirates! received great acclaim on release for a combination of genres that few had attempted at the time, and it became one of Sid Meier's most influential titles ever – its legacy is evident in later remakes and in a whole series of open strategy games. It was one of the first games to offer players, instead of a linear story, a virtual life of their own in a historical setting, an approach that later resonated across many simulations and sandbox games. Even today, the game surprises with how well it holds together despite its simplicity, and on the Atari 8-bit it remains a playable demonstration of how a complex game system can be built on limited hardware.

Why play it: For players longing for a pirate's life of their own in an open historical world, where the combination of genres still holds together decades after release.