Yes! I finally managed to find a boxed version of Pirates! again for a reasonable price. My current collecting craze started about a year ago when I set out to find an original copy of this game again . I found a copy for pretty cheap and so it’s no surprise that the box is a bit battered as is the map. But hey, it looks like a old treasure map now.

It’s the first edition of the game from 1987. And while it’s not as nice as the Amiga version that I once had, the fact that it’s an earlier version certainly adds to the charm. The manual is bit a bit different and there’s no separate “captain’s broadsheet”, but most of the text in the manual is the same as I remember.

As for the game itself, I prefer the Amiga version to the Commodore 64 version. The graphics are better but that’s not always the deciding factor. I find that the C64 version has a very bad color scheme with large white areas that hurt the eyes. Gameplay-wise the C64 version has going for it that it has a scrolling area where the ship always is in the middle. The Amiga version has static screens that flip when your ship comes near the edge which sometimes causes it to crash into an island or worse, a reef. If only the Amiga version had scrolling screens. Then it would certainly be the very best version of the original Pirates! there is.