tl;dr: Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987) defied genre conventions by blending action, strategy, RPG, and simulation elements into a cohesive whole grounded in pirate-era themes rather than existing game tropes—an approach possible because 1980s design lacked today's entrenched conventions. The article argues Pirates exemplifies a lost era of first-principles game design, shared by titles like Cinemaware's It Came from the Desert and the original Dune, that's been largely erased from gaming's collective memory due to the PC market's tiny size before the mid-90s mass-adoption era.