Pirates! just struck a chord with a lot of people. It was pretty unexpected, but I still get people who talk to me about Pirates! and say "When are you going to do another version of Pirates!?" or "That game was a lot of fun." Pirates! was basically my reaction to the adventure/RPG games that I'd played, and being frustrated with the games that were all about hit points and charisma points and pick up the stick.
| | "For me, that was frustrating. I didn't want to spend three hours building up my hit points so I could challenge the next opponent."
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For me, that was frustrating. I didn't want to spend three hours building up my hit points so I could challenge the next opponent. The idea of telling a story was kind of cool. The method it was being done in was very hackneyed. I don't know whether it came from paper gaming. It seemed to really not be computer-oriented - not what computers could do with adventures. So I did Pirates!. I thought, "This is the way I would like to see an adventure game done." Forget the points, the mathematics - just have an adventure. Go do things and wander around this world.
It was also a reaction against what I call the pick-up-the-stick games. You know, go in a room, look at the lamp, look at the drawer, open the drawer, close the door, turn on the light. Pirates! was a menu game; you had four options. You didn't have to worry about exhaustively investigating your environment for an hour before you had any fun. The idea was that there were three reasonable things you could do - pick one and move on. So it was kind of an adventure game for people who didn't like adventure games in a way, who weren't really into that technology of adventure gaming. A lot of people seemed to respond to that.
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