I recently started a game of Pirates! When I sat down to play today, the pirates were no longer the only ones spicing up their speech with arrs and ahoys. The merchants were doing it. The military were doing it. The nobles were doing it (awkwardly). The barmaids were doing it. Even the user interface was doing it.
I thought at first that it might have always been that way, and just escaped my notice, but that seemed unlikely. Next I thought I might have accidentally enabled a game option for it, but I didn't remember reconfiguring anything.
Then another possibility came to mind. It seemed like a long shot, but just in case, I looked up today's date. Sure enough, today is International Talk Like a Pirate day. This 20-year-old game apparently knows it, and switched every bit of its dialogue and writing into pirate speak to honour the occasion.
I love this.
That's awesome. Buncha nerds, hehe. I miss when games were made by a handful of friends, sure sometimes it meant they leaned a little too heavily on a mechanic that only played well in their opinion and stuff like that, the upsides were worth it though.
Crunch made sense then when all employees more or less owned the company.
I also like the fact that Sid Meier was never on board with having his name sticked on every product but the publishers pushed him to do so because of people like Peter Molyneux.
I read somewhere it was actually Robin Williams that convinced him it was a good idea. There a ton of c64 shovelware and brand recognition is a powerful tool if you can build something worthwhile