'The original game was relatively basic,' Boelen tells me. In 2006 the project was taken over by Pieter Boelen, a maritime researcher who happened upon Pirates of the Caribbean in a bargain bin. 'Making things annoyingly realistic is a through-grain in my work, given I went on to make Realism Overhaul for Kerbal!'. 'New Horizons definitely helped set me on my path', he says.

New Horizons eventually propelled Kell to full-time work in the games industry, where he worked for Squad on Kerbal Space Program before moving onto Valve. 'It was definitely the sort of grab-bag ubermod that you often find groups of newbs making (which we were!), rather than something with any kind of solid core or vision', he recalls. Nathan KellĪs a real-life sailor, Kell was unhappy with the arcadey feel of the game's sailing mechanics, so he began reworking them for greater realism, and also introduced the roots of an inter-island commodity trade system. It was definitely the sort of grab-bag ubermod that you often find groups of newbs making. To that end, he added in nation relations, plunder division with the crew, and Letters of Marque that let you become a privateer. 'Fixing bugs and annoyances, improving realism and world depth, and porting over as much as I could from Pirates! Gold', he tells me. The compiler of the original mod Nathan Kell had just three goals when he started working on New Horizons (then known only as Build Mod) in 2003. It's a ruthless simulation, and a project that's been passed down through generations of modders like an aged but steadfast Navy frigate. Today the community around the mod, known as Pirates Ahoy, totals over 8,000 members, and has turned a pokey pirate game into the deepest colonial Caribbean simulator ever made. Over the next 17 years, up to this very day, modders joined forces to work on New Horizons, an unfathomably deep total overhaul mod for Pirates of the Caribbean.

It wasn't a great game on release, and yet it garnered a following that saw potential in the unfinished sea symphony. Aside from a few lines of narration from Keira Knightley and a retrofitted plot involving the fabled Black Pearl ship, the ties to the movies were tenuous, and development was rushed to sync up with the movie's release date. In 2003, Sea Dogs 2 was rebranded to Pirates of the Caribbean just before release, when Disney licensed it as a movie tie-in.

A couple that did venture into these scarcely charted waters were the Sea Dogs and Age of Pirates series, both made by Russian studio Akella. Beyond Sid Meier's Pirates, there aren't that many games that have attempted serious pirate simulation.

Sea dogs to each his own walkthrough