Sid Meier's Pirates!

Sid Meier's Pirates!

Sid Meier’s Pirates! is a video game created by Sid Meier and developed and published by MicroProse in 1987. It was the first game to include the name "Sid Meier" in its title as an effort by MicroProse to attract fans of Meier's earlier games, most of which were combat vehicle simulation video games. The game is a simulation of the life of a pirate, a privateer or a pirate hunter in the Spanish Main in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

The game was widely ported from the original Commodore 64 version. It was ported to the Apple II (1987), as a PC booter (1987), Apple IIGS (1988), Macintosh (1988), Amstrad CPC (1988), Atari ST (1989), Amiga (1990), Nintendo Entertainment System (1991), iPad (2011) and Windows Phone 7 (2012).

Pirates! is set in the Caribbean. The Pirates! playing field includes the Spanish Main (namely the northern coast of South America), Central America and the Yucatán Peninsula, the entire Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and all Caribbean islands including Bermuda. The player is free to sail to any part of the above mentioned lands, stopped by an invisible barrier southeast of Trinidad, all the way north to just northeast of Bermuda.

Pirates! was released in several different versions for the PC; the original 1987 game (which came on a self-booting disk), a 1989 DOS rerelease (otherwise functionally identical to the booter version), a 1991 release which came on high density floppies and only had the manual copy protection, and the 1994 edition which was a fully modernized CD-ROM game with VGA graphics. The 16-bit versions of Pirates! have an extra feature where governors assign you missions that was not in the 8-bit versions. A port for the Nintendo Entertainment System appeared in 1991, developed by Rare Ltd. and published by Ultra Games. Notably, tobacco is replaced as a trade item by "crops" because of Nintendo's family-friendly requirements.