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

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Cites jhallenworld · 2022-08 · on “Play MSDOS Oregon Trail 1990 on archive.org”

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

Cites vidarh · 2025-06 · on “Sid Meier's Pirates – In-depth (2017)”

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 BASI

Cites the_af · 2026-08 · on “The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates”

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 ga