I have a very stream-of-conscious sort of thinking. I’ll be in the middle of something like watching a video, listening to music, playing a game, then suddenly think about something related to what I’m doing right now, like information on a movie or song. It happens to me very often, leading to me going on weird tangents about silly stuff. In some cases, it can lead me down a rabbit hole I wasn’t expecting, such as how a jingoistic military FPS lead me down to a pirate mod.
Plunder & Pillage is a standalone modification for the Build engine where, naturally, you play as a pirate sailing the high seas. From creator Jesse Petrilla, he seemed to be a bit interested in modifying the old Build engine long after engines like Unreal Engine and id Tech 3 were available.
I could give you the plot summary, but I’ll just quote the modification’s readme file:
You are Capt. Jess Murdock, a renegade pirate who has lost everything in a shipwreck on the high seas. You wash up on the shore of an island inhabited by pirates of other gangs, you must fight your way through the island, and plunder and pillage all that you can in an attempt to regain what was lost and make a name for yourself as the most feared pirate on the high seas.
Yeah, it’s a simple game, this isn’t Secret of Monkey Island levels of story complexity, it’s a by-the-numbers first person shooter. There isn’t anything wrong with that.
After I downloaded Plunder & Pillage and gave it the proper tweaks for it to work in DOSBox — as of this writing, no Build engine source port supports this abandonware — I stepped into the boots of Jess Murdock, “arrrrrr”ing like the rest of them.
Plunder & Pillage shows three episodes, but in reality there’s only one episode with three short, quick levels. In the first level, Murdock kills some pirates to get a new ship. The second level involves him going through Parrot Island and… plundering the place? I guess that does fall right into the game’s title.
Unfortunately this has all the hallmarks of a Duke Nukem 3D total conversion, and not done very well. Enemies will do devastating damage even at range, and a lot of the items and weapons are just identical to the base game. Murdock starts out with a flintlock pistol and can get more weapons like a blunderbuss that works like a shotgun, and an explosive crossbow, which acts like the game’s rocket launcher. Even the setup menu references stuff like the Holoduke and Jetpack, something our Cap’n doesn’t get the opportunity to use.
At one point, finishing the second “episode” lead to a cutscene from Duke Nukem 3D plays, the one where Duke Nukem kills the Overlord boss. I’m genuinely surprised 3DRealms didn’t get on his ass. Guess they were too busy “developing” Duke Nukem Forever to care.
Plunder & Pillage is surprisingly short. There’s only three playable levels, and as far as I know the only version available is this three level demo. It would’ve been nice to see some more levels with interesting designs, but I think Jesse Petrilla should’ve gotten some level designers, because all three levels here are unremarkable and rather straightforward.
You think that would be the end of this saga, which would make for a fairly short article. But now here comes the twist, and it’s gonna go in a way that you don’t expect.
After the tragic events on September 11, 2001, Plunder & Pillage designer Jesse Petrilla completely switched gears and was hard at work on a new game. Sticking with the aging Build engine, he changed the premise: going from fighting pirates to fighting… the War on Terror.