I love that Meier's memoir is titled: "Sid Meier's Memoir!"
(Although remapradio's login system isn't working for me - it uses magic links, which bring me to a logged-in https://remap.memberful.com/account page, but on remapradio.com I still show as logged out even on hard refresh.)
> Pirates essentially changed the studio's whole identity, something that was incredibly hard to do even in those days.
There are indeed very few examples I can recall of a game that completely changed a studio, but one that comes to mind is Worms. Team 17 mostly made top down shooters and fighting games, until they released a silly trajectory shooting game inspired by the ancient basic game, Gorilla. That was such a massive success they mostly only made Worms games after that
Worms were such great games. I just had a look at what Team 17 is up to now and [they're doing surprisingly well.](https://www.team17.com/) Some great games in their portfolio.
Epic also did really well changing with the times. From Jazz Jackrabbit to one of the largest developers in the world.
Nitpick: not Gorilla.bas; it was the actual OG, Artillery. Prototypes, which used sprites ripped from Lemmings, were even named "Lemartillery".
And the creative bankrupcy of T17 is a whole another topic. I would rather suggest that they lucked into Worms when Davidson approached them by happenstance, and would not survive otherwise.
same here, on my amiga 500 and later on the PC. i was a kid and barely able to understand what was going on (but that didn't matter that much anyway), my english was absolutely inadequate for the text. i remember pestering my father about the vocabulary: "what does 'squashbuckler' mean? what's 'swashbuckler'? what's 'merchantman' and 'the flying dutchman'?" (the last was actually a misreading of "she's flying dutch colors" when you looked at a dutch ship).
the worst was when i got too far north-west and had to sail back into settled territory against the wind, which took ages.
something else that stuck in my mind was the soundtrack - iirc mostly händel and bach.
ps: years later i found the "mount & blade" series (which i too love), which is roughly the same but medieval and on land.
I used to play it quite a bit back when it came out. It was fun trying to build up a fleet without getting smashed by the colonial genocide empire (e. g. British and whoever else had ships). It was a bit too focused only on the pirate theme though; civilization was better. (Colonization had a similar problem as pirates had in that it was too focused on the revolution, so civilization really had the better idea going.)
I also used to play e. g. Die Hanse (german, trade-focused); would have been great if Pirates could have integrated more trade-related aspects while keeping the pirate focus too. Modern games seem to just be 3D clones with simplified gameplay, I don't quite understand how people can play these. They seem to have been dumbed down immensely just for the money grab alone.
Oh, the Hanseatic League game. I played that once. It involved an awful lot of sailing your trading cog up and down the Baltic, apparently in real time. I like games very slow, but this was too much even for my taste. If I had stuck with it I think there would have eventually been fighting to defend a city and perhaps a city-builder aspect?
(Although remapradio's login system isn't working for me - it uses magic links, which bring me to a logged-in https://remap.memberful.com/account page, but on remapradio.com I still show as logged out even on hard refresh.)
> Pirates essentially changed the studio's whole identity, something that was incredibly hard to do even in those days.
There are indeed very few examples I can recall of a game that completely changed a studio, but one that comes to mind is Worms. Team 17 mostly made top down shooters and fighting games, until they released a silly trajectory shooting game inspired by the ancient basic game, Gorilla. That was such a massive success they mostly only made Worms games after that
Epic also did really well changing with the times. From Jazz Jackrabbit to one of the largest developers in the world.
And the creative bankrupcy of T17 is a whole another topic. I would rather suggest that they lucked into Worms when Davidson approached them by happenstance, and would not survive otherwise.
ps: years later i found the "mount & blade" series (which i too love), which is roughly the same but medieval and on land.
I also used to play e. g. Die Hanse (german, trade-focused); would have been great if Pirates could have integrated more trade-related aspects while keeping the pirate focus too. Modern games seem to just be 3D clones with simplified gameplay, I don't quite understand how people can play these. They seem to have been dumbed down immensely just for the money grab alone.