Exploring Sid Meier's Pirates! - BASIC Code, Quirks, Bugs on Commodore 64

What people said

the_af · 2026-08 · Reference

Sid Meier's Pirates! was a fantastic game in which I spent a ton of time. I still find it hard to believe it was written mostly in C64 BASIC [1] (I suppose not the dueling scenes though). I think everyone who was a gamer back then knows the game, so it's not really a hidden treasure. It may be lost now to modern audiences, though. By the way, I also enjoyed the remake, with one caveat: I absolutely cannot stand the "simlish" language they speak; I understand they did it to aid in localization, but so much is lost with that nonsense... they should have just used subtitled English with pirate-y voices (or Spanish, but I suppose the English-speaking world was their primary audience). Another game which is fantastic in a similar sense than Pirates! is MicroProse's "Sword of the Samurai" [2], apparently made after the resounding success of the former. It's probably the most tasteful and "authentic" samurai game ever made. Yes, even more than the Total War series. It chronicled your rise from a lowly no-name samurai, to Hatamoto, to (hopefully) Shogun. It has duels, marriages, rescues and kidnapping, loyalty and betrayal, tactical battles and strategy, and (taking into account its pixelated era), the graphics are really appropriate . I often wish for a remake of Sword of the Samurai, but maybe it's best that nobody did a half-assed attempt and botched it. ---- [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

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vidarh · 2025-06 · Reference

No, not entirely, but you'd have needed to poke around a bit (pun intended - not sorry) to realise - if you stop it (I think just RUN STOP + RESTORE was sufficient at the right spots in the game, but if not, a freezer cartridge would make it trivial) and LIST, you get a huge BASIC listing, so a lot of it is BASIC. Here's a Youtube video going through some of it [1]. Especially at the end he lists a large chunk and you'll see there aren't a lot of SYS calls to machine code so it's not surprising people whould think so. In the comments to the Youtube video someone made this statement - I don't know whether or not it's accurate, but it seems plausible (you probably could do much of that in BASIC too, but especially the scrolling would likely be really slow and janky): > It is mainly the text screens that are programmed in BASIC. The battles are all in machine code, including the sword battles, the ship sailing and the ship battles, the drawing of the terrain and the men walking on the land; basically anything that involved reading the joystick input and displaying sprites is all programmed in machine code and are called by SYS routines from BASIC. I spend many hours exploring the code and hacking the game by changing variables and memory locations. [1] [VIDEO]

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jhallenworld · 2022-08 · Reference

A similar game is Pirates! [VIDEO] I like that one of the most popular c64 games was partially written in BASIC.

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