// PC GAMER — GAMING
I cannot believe this obscure MMO from my childhood is still going 23 years later
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I grew up in the 2000s with a PC but not a whole lot of money. That's the kind of combination that gets you bargain-bin Sold Out Software games from Poundland or, more so in my case, an absurd number of free-to-play online and browser-based games that were utterly pervasive across the internet.
My childhood was a never-ending revolving door of these mid-tier Flash and Java games. Some have long left my memory, a fleeting experience. But some continue to rattle around in my brain, reminding me of simpler times where I didn't have to pay taxes or subject myself to at least one hour of screen-free time before bed lest I wake up with a headache the next morning.
But where are these weird and wonderful games now? Are they still scattered across the internet? Are they in their original forms, practically untouched, or have they evolved into far deeper and darker games than they once were?
Well, as I continue to march into my 30s against my will, I've been thinking back to the games I would play as a child and asking myself just that question. So why don't we go and check in on a couple of them?
Puzzle Pirates is, if you haven't already guessed, an MMO where you are a pirate and you do puzzles. Every component of a ship's operation is done through different puzzles—bilging is a Bejeweled-inspired match three, sailing is a buccaneering Doctor Mario, patching the sails is incredibly similar to Pipe Dream. You get the drill.
It's an incredible niche premise, one I expected to have long sunk. Except… it hasn't? As I popped on the internet to see if the game was still kicking around, I was shocked to discover that it was. Hell, it's on Steam. Still official and everything! No private, fan-run server to be seen! A couple seconds and a mere 85mb download later and my ears were being thoroughly blasted with jaunty pirate tunes. A search through my ancient childhood email inbox revealed that my original account was unfortunately deleted in 2012, so I made a brand-new pirate called Johnpcgamer (pirates are a singular-named folk, it seems) and dove right in.
And, well, aside from being told how to purchase premium currency within the first 60 seconds of being born, it's exactly how I remembered it. There are a lot less mateys milling around these days—most of them seemed to be the real for-lifers, ones with more trophies and gold and puzzle proficiency than most of the server combines—so I dove into a few tutorial voyages with some friendly bot pirates.
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As a child I mostly stuck to bilging—as far as I could remember it was one of the easiest, and it was also one of the main duties assigned to scrubs like myself. I made a start with that one, before moving on to carpentry and rigging. And the minigames still hold up surprisingly well today, unsurprising considering most of them are inspired by iconic, already-established puzzles.