The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - Sword of the Samurai
This 1989 action strategy game is like Sid Meier’s Pirates! meets the Sengoku era, and it's from the same development studio as the Caribbean-themed classic!
RELEASE DATE: 1989
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: MicroProse
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
BEST VERSIONS: MS-DOS
One PC game from the 1980s I can recommend to just about anyone is Sid Meier’s Pirates!, a Commodore 64 game that was widely ported to other platforms and which offered players a chance to become a swarthy pirate of the Caribbean in a pseudo-historical simulation that included some heavy notes of Treasure Island and Errol Flynn. By giving the player direct control over the action and including arcade-style minigames centered around swashbuckling, ship combat and coastal raiding, Pirates! broke the mold of 1980s strategy simulations and was instantly accessible to just about anyone with a PC.
Sword of the Samurai is a sort of sequel to Sid Meier’s Pirates and was developed by a team of MicroProse regulars led by Lawrence Schick (who made a name for himself at TSR before embarking on a career in computer game development that included being Lead Loremaster for The Elder Scrolls games for many years) with the famous Sid Meier credited merely for the dueling system. The game reflects enormous research into Japanese history and even features an ukiyo-e graphical style as well as a font reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy. In fact, the game leans so heavily into Japanese culture and history that it loses much of its initial accessibility, but like most of the games MicroProse created in the 1980s, it’s such a refined experience with so much depth that anyone who gives the game a fair chance will find it rewards them with an incredible experience.
The game begins by casting you as a young 15-year-old samurai who starts out as an up-and-coming member of a clan in one of the many provinces of Japan. You begin with a fief and limited options to build up your holdings and your honor. How you play the game is entirely up to you – you can be the sort who raises up armies to help your local hatamoto lord, you can wander around the province doing good deeds and marrying into money, or you can even be a loathsome sneak who’s constantly trying to assassinate your neighboring rivals, kidnap their family members and rile up their peasants. Like Pirates!, there are several minigames to simulate different battle sequences, including a dueling swordfighting mode, an overhead infiltration mode and a tactical battlefield mode that is reminiscent of Ancient Art of War.
If you make a run at taking over a territory by deposing the hatamoto or the daimyo, you can count on going through all of those modes to ensure your ambition is backed up by your warrior’s honor. If you should commit a deed that’s too dishonorable and live to tell the tale, you can be ordered to return home and commit seppuku to spare your clan or you can become a notorious villain the other lords will constantly harass until you either defeat them or find some pathway to restore your honor.
Much of the fun in the game comes from plotting a path and committing to it, both in terms of the strategic decisions you make and the role-playing you infuse into your character. It’s also possible to marry and have sons who can carry on your legacy if you pass away, and if you can manage to make it to the status of Shogun before the game is over, you’ll even get to fast-forward into the future to see how historians remember your reign.
Granted, Sword of the Samurai does have some weaknesses. The controls aren’t great (particularly for dueling, which utilizes a weird angle and some clunky mechanics), and the game’s AI is easily exploited once you know what you’re doing. The tactical battles are simplistic and often focus on making the right call on one or two formations and then letting the soldiers figure the rest out on their own. The simulation also becomes very repetitious after awhile, and it takes far too long to advance to the rank of Shogun, making the game obnoxiously slow-paced at times. But many of these gripes are reflective of the broader strategy genre, and even Sid Meier’s Pirates!, great as it is, is well-known for its grueling grind of a mid-game.
As with many MicroProse games, the manual for Sword of the Samurai is also a must-read, not because the game itself requires studying it (you can actually muddle your way through everything just knowing the basic controls), but because it’s wonderfully detailed and includes a very readable history of Feudal Japan that explains not just the key figures and turning point events, but also the culture surrounding them. There’s even a note at the end from Lawrence Schick about the elements that the development team wanted to work in, but couldn’t. This knowledge is not only helpful in understanding the undercurrents of what’s going on in the game’s simulation, but also helpful for providing context for other Sengoku-era games like Nobunaga’s Ambition, Samurai Warriors, Shogun: Total War, Kessen or Way of the Samurai.
If you’ve played and enjoyed Sid Meier’s Pirates!, you’ll probably like Sword of the Samurai. The original version was only released for MS-DOS, but it’s quite easy to play on modern systems thanks to an official re-release on GOG and Steam. The keyboard controls are fine, but a good classic joystick truly feels like it’s the way the game was meant to be played.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about 3D games, arcade action games, wargames, grand strategy games, RPGs, sports games, gameroom games, puzzle games and so much more.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
This series will continue to cover games written by unique personalities like Chris Crawford, Roberta Williams and Danielle Bunten Berry, by great writers like Steve Meretzky, Michael Bywater, Robert Pinsky and Brian Moriarty, and based on the work of famous authors like Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, William Gibson and Douglas Adams.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!