Pirates of the Barbary Coast

Year 1987, the Mediterranean Sea, a pirate named Bloodthroat has just kidnapped your daughter. You have thirty days and fifty thousand gold pieces for the ransom. Sound Blaster didn't exist yet, so everything happened in silence — or with that shrill beeping of the PC speaker, which motivated you to hurry rather than ponder.

Pirates of the Barbary Coast by Starsoft Development Laboratories is a nautical simulator set in the waters of North Africa and the Mediterranean. You play a merchant who became an avenger overnight — and must raise a considerable sum before his daughter Katherine ends up in a harem. For 1987, the plot is surprisingly specific and gives the game meaningful time pressure.

The game combines trading between ports with naval combat. You buy goods, sell them for profit, recruit crew, repair your ship and occasionally encounter pirates. The trading system is straightforward — no complex tables, more intuitive buy cheap, sell high. Naval battles happen in their own perspective and are quite angular by today's standards, but at the time of release it was a solid attempt at dynamics. What the game won't forgive is procrastination — the thirty-day time limit is real, and if you get lost in trading and forget about the main goal, you'll lose Katherine before you can blink.

Today, Pirates of the Barbary Coast is interesting mainly as an artifact. It was part of a wave of games that tried to blend trade, action and a story goal together — a genre that Sid Meier's Pirates! perfected in the same era. Compared to it, Barbary Coast looks thin, but that's somewhat unfair — Starsoft was a small studio and ambitions were proportional to the budget. The graphics are modest even by '88 standards, the text sometimes looks like a machine translation from English through a third language, but the basic loop works and the gameplay has substance.

Today it will be played mainly by those who want to map less explored corners of gaming history — or those with a weakness for pirate themes and don't mind that this version of the Caribbean is more off the Moroccan coast. Runs in DOSBox without much magic. Expect about an hour to understand the mechanics, then decide if you want to stay. It's not a game that pulls you by the sleeve. It's a game that quietly waits to see if you'll come on your own.