The Seven Cities of Gold

The Seven Cities of Gold was designed in 1984 by Dan Bunten and the Ozark Softscape team for a still-young Electronic Arts, and it stands among the most influential games of the entire decade. You are a Spanish explorer: fit out an expedition with ships, men, provisions and trade goods, cross the Atlantic, and begin uncovering the New World.

What was unheard of at the time is how open the whole design is. You chart coastlines, sail rivers deep inland, stumble upon villages and fabled cities of gold — and how you treat the native peoples is entirely a matter of your own conscience. You can trade, hand out gifts and patiently build a reputation, or draw swords and take whatever you can carry. The game never preaches; it simply keeps the books. Word of a massacre travels, and the next villages will receive you very differently. For 1984, that was a remarkably grown-up treatment of the conquest of the Americas.

You sail home with gold and maps, earning ranks and funding for further, better-equipped expeditions. And once the historical map has been squeezed dry, the game will generate an entirely new continent for you — a feature almost nobody else could offer in the mid-eighties.

Four decades on, honesty requires admitting the interface has aged: the controls are clumsy, provisioning spartan, the pace unhurried. But the skeleton — set sail, discover, decide how to behave, live with the consequences — still works, and it carries the signature of a designer later known as Danielle Bunten Berry, one of the most respected figures of early game design. Without this game there is no Pirates! and no long line of exploration classics after it.

You can play it at oldgame.cz right in the browser, with no installation.