Sid Meier’s Pirates! is the original award-winning pirate life simulation game developed and published by MicroProse in 1987 for the Commodore 64. Over the years, it was ported to several other platforms, including the Apple II, Amstrad CPC, and PC Booster. The Amiga version arrived in 1990.
It was designed by Sid Meier and Arnold Hendrick, with Hendrick contributing extensive historical research on Caribbean piracy between 1560 and 1680. It is one of the greatest games ever made.
The game puts you in command of a pirate ship in the Spanish Main. You choose your nationality — English, Spanish, Dutch, or French — your starting era, and a special skill that shapes your entire playthrough. From there, the game is entirely open. You sail between colonies, trading goods, gathering intelligence in taverns, and managing your crew's loyalty with a steady supply of plunder. The four European powers are in shifting alliances, and your standing with each one determines where you can dock safely and who will send privateers after you.
When conflict arrives, the game drops you into one of three action sequences: sea battles where you manoeuvre your ship using wind direction before ramming and boarding the enemy; land battles pitting your crew against a colony's garrison; and sword duels — the most frequent and satisfying — decided one-on-one in real time with your choice of rapier, longsword, or cutlass. Victory in the duel ends the fight regardless of crew numbers.
The game has no fixed ending. You age throughout, your reflexes slow, and eventually retirement is the only sensible option. Your final rank — from common beggar to the King's advisor — depends on the wealth, land, and titles you've accumulated along the way.
What makes Pirates! extraordinary is how naturally all of these elements fit together. The sailing informs the sea battles; the trading economy shapes which governors will help you; the family rescue storyline gives the open world a personal stake. Each scene is short and punchy enough that you never lose the thread of what you were doing. Meier later attempted a similar cross-genre hybrid with Covert Action and judged the result far less successful — in Pirates! everything just works, in a way he himself has struggled to fully explain. Decades later, with open-world games commonplace, it still feels ahead of its time.
The Commodore 64 original is a marvel of programming craft: a living world of faction politics, treasure maps, buried gold, and shifting alliances, all running in 64K with fast disk loads and a clean, elegant interface. The Amiga version improves on it with richer music through the Paula chip and sharper visuals, while keeping the same tight, responsive design. Both versions are considered among the finest games ever made on their respective platforms — and among the finest games of the 1980s, full stop.
Pirates! was MicroProse's best-selling game of 1987 and the first to carry the "Sid Meier's" prefix. Its open-world design, faction reputation system, and blend of strategy and action mini-games influenced an entire genre. Pirates! is ranked in our GamesNostalgia's Top 20 Commodore 64 Games of All Time — one of the essential C64 titles you shouldn't miss. If you enjoy this kind of open-ended historical sandbox, also try Seven Cities of Gold — the Danielle Bunten Berry game that directly inspired Pirates! — and Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons, which applies a similar formula to exploration and trade in the Age of Discovery. The 1993 remake Pirates! Gold offers the same gameplay with VGA graphics, an improved soundtrack, and additional content.
Download for PC 
Download for Mac 
