Cities are also dynamic, with statistics like wealth and population fluctuating constantly. The player can access any city's statistics. Knowing the statistics of a city helps the player plan ahead, especially with regards to trading or any desire to raid or conquer cities. The original versions of "Pirates!" sported both disk and manual copy protections. Users were asked the time at which various treasure ships were arriving at the port. If the time was wrong, the game would continue, but at a much higher difficulty level that would frustrate most people. In early 1986, Meier and fellow MicroProse designer Arnold Hendrick wanted to create a role-playing adventure game, but Meier's business partner Bill Stealey was skeptical of producing non-vehicle simulations. The company planned several game elements that it removed before release, including multiple NPCs per town, more detailed sailing including fleet actions, and a subplot involving religion and nobility. "Pirates!" success resulted in the similar "Sword of the Samurai". With five successful years behind him, Microprose considered star designer Sid Meier a selling point and chose to put his name on the box of his next game, despite a shift away from combat simulators he had become known for. According to Stealey, the idea to add Meier's name came after meeting Robin Williams. "We were at dinner at a Software Publishers Association meeting, and Robin Williams was there. And he kept us in stitches for two hours. And he turns to me and says 'Bill, you should put Sid's name on a couple of these boxes, and promote him as the star.'" Meier in his interview said that ""Pirates!" was actually inspired by a technological trick" when "one of our programmers came up with a cool trick where we could create images, pieces of art, by packing them into a font. And that allowed us to very quickly bring in new pictures." Meier admits that "Pirates!" was not intended to provide an authentic, true-to-life recreation of historical piracy. ""Pirates!" was designed more around your fantasy of pirates than the actual reality," he said in an interview. "That allowed you to bring in all the stuff from the movies, whatever you had read, whatever was in your imagination." "Pirates!" was a groundbreaking game in its era. Its puzzles appealed more to female gamers than previous products from MicroProse, a company known for military simulations like "F-15 Strike Eagle". Although other open-ended games had already been released, the style of player-directed gameplay in "Pirates!"