The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier’s Pirates!

席德·梅尔《海盗！》的失落宝藏

Featured Retrospective Feature | Bruno Dias | August 20th, 2026 专题回顾 | Bruno Dias | 2026年8月20日

When Microprose greenlit Sid Meier’s Pirates! in 1986, the company—which Meier founded along with Bill Stealey back in 1982—was mostly known for vehicle sims (Gunship, Spitfire Ace, F-15 Strike Eagle) and dry strategic wargames like Crusade in Europe. 1986年，当 Microprose 批准开发席德·梅尔的《海盗！》（Sid Meier’s Pirates!）时，这家由梅尔和比尔·斯蒂利（Bill Stealey）于1982年共同创立的公司，主要以载具模拟游戏（如《炮艇》、《喷火王牌》、《F-15 攻击鹰》）和诸如《欧洲十字军》这类枯燥的战略战争游戏而闻名。

Pirates was something different. It’s hard to pin it down to a genre even today, but it certainly wasn’t like previous Meier titles—even though it’s the first game to be called Sid Meier’s Something or Other. At the time the game came out in 1987, it was generally called an “action adventure” game; this is somewhat hard to square with the way most people today would understand the genre. It has basically nothing in common with contemporaries like Castlevania, Metroid, or The Legend of Zelda. 《海盗！》则截然不同。即便在今天，也很难将其归入某个特定的游戏类型，但它显然与梅尔之前的作品大相径庭——尽管这是第一款冠以“席德·梅尔的某某某”之名的游戏。在1987年游戏发售时，它通常被称为“动作冒险”游戏；这与现代人对该类型的理解有些难以对齐。它与当时的《恶魔城》、《银河战士》或《塞尔达传说》等同类作品几乎没有任何共同之处。

There’s no platforming of any kind; controlling the player character directly and individually is restricted to brief sword-fighting sequences. Those have controls and mechanics that are totally unlike any other game combat I’ve seen. It tries to create the feeling of an Errol Flynn fencing duel with an elaborate control scheme that’s more like a mutant version of a fighting game; you can thrust (which is fast) or slash (which does more damage), or parry; you can also either aim low, or high, or down the middle. 游戏中没有任何平台跳跃元素；直接操控玩家角色的部分仅限于简短的剑斗环节。这些环节的控制和机制与我见过的任何其他游戏战斗都完全不同。它试图通过一套复杂的控制方案来营造埃罗尔·弗林（Errol Flynn）式击剑决斗的感觉，这套方案更像是一种变异的格斗游戏；你可以突刺（速度快）、劈砍（伤害高）或格挡；你还可以选择瞄准低位、高位或中路。

Those motions are mapped to the eight-direction joystick commonly used for games on the Commodore 64 and other eighties computers—or, if you don’t have one of those, they’re mapped to the keyboard numpad. Some ports of the game let you do it with the mouse, or with awkward combinations of mouse clicks and keyboard input. 这些动作被映射到 Commodore 64 和其他八十年代计算机常用的八向摇杆上——如果你没有摇杆，也可以映射到键盘的小键盘上。游戏的一些移植版本允许你使用鼠标，或者通过鼠标点击与键盘输入的别扭组合来操作。

This description makes the swordfighting in Pirates sound terrible and indeed it is hard to defend; the 2004 remake substantially simplified it, but that simplification only peels away its skin to reveal a strange quasi-rhythm game buried underneath. It still feels in no way like a concession to “standard” combat design. 这种描述让《海盗！》中的剑斗听起来很糟糕，确实也很难为其辩护；2004年的重制版大幅简化了这一系统，但这种简化只是剥去了它的外壳，露出了深藏其中的、奇怪的类节奏游戏内核。它依然完全不像是在向“标准”战斗设计妥协。

But what you have to understand about playing this game—whether the original 1987 version, the many 1988 ports, the beautiful 1993 remaster Pirates! Gold with its 256-color graphics, or the modernized 2004 remake—is that if you encounter it at an early age it will open a rift in your brain. 但关于这款游戏，你必须明白的是——无论是1987年的原版、1988年的众多移植版、1993年拥有256色画面的精美重制版《海盗！黄金版》，还是2004年的现代化重制版——如果你在年少时接触到它，它都会在你的大脑中撕开一道裂痕。

When I asked Nic Tringali (designer of The Banished Vault and Amberspire) about it, they put it perfectly: “Pirates! feels unstuck in genre, not quite an open-world game or a role-playing game, not only economic strategy or resource management. It has a goal for a clear thematic position for the player to inhabit and uses the systems and friction to reach that. The peculiarities of its design are unique and inseparable—the wind always blowing east comes to mind, and dueling a rival captain immediately winning a sea battle—and are not solely driven by video game genre expectations, or pre-packaged ideas redressed in a pirate theme.” 当我问及 Nic Tringali（《The Banished Vault》和《Amberspire》的设计师）时，他们给出了完美的评价：“《海盗！》感觉像是脱离了类型限制，它既不是完全的开放世界游戏或角色扮演游戏，也不仅仅是经济战略或资源管理游戏。它为玩家设定了一个清晰的主题定位，并利用系统和冲突来实现这一目标。其设计的独特性是不可分割的——比如总是向东吹的风，以及通过与敌方船长决斗来直接赢得海战——这些设计并非仅仅由游戏类型的预期所驱动，也不是披着海盗外衣的预包装概念。”

Meier was working in an era where genre and mechanics were still unsettled, undefined things. In his 2020 memoir—would you believe it’s called Sid Meier’s Memoir!—Meier pointed out that “The good news was there were very few preconceived notions back then about what a game was supposed to be. The bad news was there were no tried-and-true conventions, either.” All of Pirates is like this; a bunch of first-principles attempts at extricating game mechanics from all the half-remembered pirate tropes rattling inside Meier’s brain. 梅尔所处的时代，游戏类型和机制尚不稳定且未被定义。在他2020年的回忆录中——你敢信它就叫《席德·梅尔回忆录！》——梅尔指出：“好消息是，当时人们对游戏‘应该是什么样’几乎没有什么先入为主的观念。坏消息是，也没有任何经过验证的惯例可循。”《海盗！》的全部内容皆是如此；这是一系列基于第一性原理的尝试，旨在从梅尔脑海中那些半生不熟的海盗桥段中提炼出游戏机制。

The resulting game takes all these romanticized ideas pointing towards a genre—Treasure Island, Errol Flynn movies, Peter Pan, the centuries-old distillation of the Black Legend into anglophone culture—and treats them not as story beats to play out or as window dressing, but as the grounding rules of a clockwork world that you can poke and prod at. 最终诞生的游戏汲取了所有指向这一类型的浪漫化构想——《金银岛》、埃罗尔·弗林的电影、彼得·潘，以及几个世纪以来“黑色传说”（Black Legend）在英语文化中的沉淀——并将它们视为一个精密发条世界的底层规则，而非仅仅是用来演绎的剧情节点或装饰品，你可以对这个世界进行探索和干预。

The game models the way silver travels on mule trains all the way from Potosí to be loaded up on ships in Panama, and from there along the ports of Gran Colombia until the Treasure Fleet, heavy with the blood of the Americas, leaves for Spain. The game models the way that a pirate’s harsh life wears you down over time, each merchant ship captain or colonial guard that you fight seeming that little bit faster until you have to admit that your sword arm just isn’t what it used to be. The game seeds the Caribbean with an elaborate, randomized quest to find your long-lost family, chasing down a laundry list of villainous aristocrats to rescue relative after relative from indentured servitude on obscure plantations. 游戏模拟了白银如何通过骡队从波托西一路运往巴拿马装船，再沿着大哥伦比亚的港口航行，直到满载美洲血泪的宝藏舰队启程前往西班牙。游戏模拟了海盗艰苦的生活如何随着时间推移消磨你的意志，你所对抗的每一位商船船长或殖民地卫兵似乎都变得更快，直到你不得不承认自己的剑术已大不如前。游戏在加勒比海中埋下了寻找失散家人的复杂随机任务，让你去追捕一长串邪恶的贵族，将亲人们从偏僻种植园的契约奴役中一一解救出来。

To modern design sensibilities, I think there’s a risk one might look at Pirates and see a bunch of minigames in a trenchcoat. In reality, what that game is expressing is a way of thinking about games that we’ve tamped down over the years as the medium has built up its own library of conventions, tropes, and recycled ideas. 以现代的设计审美来看，我认为人们可能会冒着一种风险，即把《海盗！》看作是一堆披着外衣的小游戏集合。实际上，这款游戏所表达的是一种我们多年来逐渐压抑的游戏思维方式，因为随着媒介的发展，它已经建立起了一套属于自己的惯例、桥段和循环利用的创意库。

Pirates is hewn from its underlying themes in a very raw way, but so are many other games of this era. Cinemaware, a now largely forgotten studio, made a whole very successful business out of this style of design. Their 1989 title, It Came from the Desert, gleefully jumps around in presentation and perspective—one moment a rudimentary first-person shooting gallery, the next a top-down smup, all wrapped up in a visual novel wearing the skin of a strategy game. The original Dune video game—not Dune II, the origin point of real-time strategy as we know it—was essentially an attempt at capturing the whole scope of the 1984 David Lynch movie, oscillating between a strategy game about spice extraction and a visual novel-like adaptation of the movie’s plot. 《海盗！》以一种非常原始的方式从其底层主题中雕琢而成，那个时代的其他许多游戏也是如此。Cinemaware 这家如今已被遗忘的工作室，曾凭借这种设计风格取得了巨大的商业成功。他们1989年的作品《沙漠异形》（It Came from the Desert）在表现形式和视角上欢快地跳跃——前一刻是简陋的第一人称射击场，下一刻变成了俯视视角的射击游戏，所有这些都被包裹在披着战略游戏外衣的视觉小说中。最初的《沙丘》电子游戏——不是作为现代即时战略游戏鼻祖的《沙丘2》——本质上是试图捕捉1984年大卫·林奇电影的全貌，在关于香料开采的战略游戏和电影剧情的视觉小说式改编之间摇摆不定。

Pirates was immensely successful in its own time, and this exact style of design thinking was then adapted to Microprose’s follow-ups—classics like Covert Action and Sword of the Samurai. Pirates essentially changed the studio’s whole identity, something that was incredibly hard to do even in those days. 《海盗！》在当时取得了巨大的成功，这种设计思维随后被应用到 Microprose 的后续作品中——如《秘密行动》（Covert Action）和《武士之剑》（Sword of the Samurai）等经典之作。《海盗！》从本质上改变了这家工作室的整体定位，这在当时是极其困难的。

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