Do you remember sitting in school, wishing your history class would be over so that you could run home and play Seven Cities of Gold and create your own history where you were a European explorer searching for riches and renown on an unexplored continent? If so, keep it to yourself, because that’s seriously creepy. But any game you played as a kid has to be better than anything available today, because that’s one of the laws of gaming. Or at least game remembering.

Released in 1984 for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari 800, and in 1987 for whatever machine followed the PC Jr., Seven Cities of Gold is the game Dani Bunten made to prove she wasn’t just the genius who wrote M.U.L.E. I guess that’s assigning an arbitrary motive to the game’s development. Seven Cities of Gold was a game that reflected the most basic desires of computer gamers: the ability to envision a huge world inside the computer that you could actually discover and interact with. You crossed the ocean and used precious supplies to travel across the continent. You visited native villages and hoped for good trade opportunities. And you eagerly made trips home to cash in on your success. In a way, it was the prototypical trip to Ironforge: you collected your loot on the frontier, and went back to level up.

Ever since someone discovered that you could turn a physics assignment into a game by pretending the goal was to land an asterisk on the surface of the moon using arrow keys, gaming advocates have claimed that games make you smarter, or at least teach you something, even if it doesn’t help you out in any practical way. Ironically, as games have become more interesting to mainstream audiences, designers have become somewhat more circumspect in what they’re actually teaching. In Seven Cities of Gold, you could raze Indian settlements in keeping with the educational theory of factual representation. In Age of Empires III, Indians are allied with Mother Nature and their settlements (although not their warriors) are indestructible. While that absolves strategy gamers of any sticky moral choices, I’m pretty sure games about WWII still let the Germans invade Poland.

Sid Meier’s Pirates! was released in 1987, and while its genius was its own, I can’t help but think that with its expansive world and sense of exploration, Seven Cities of Gold figured in some way into the design. Meier all but admits it. “It opened our eyes to the tremendous possibilities for computer games,” he said when I asked him how Seven Cities influenced his games. “Dani Bunten helped us to see that a well made game can place a whole world inside your computer that’s just waiting to be explored.” Which is pretty much exactly what Seven Cities of Gold was all about.

And which, sadly, is one of the things this genre has lost. When playing Seven Cities of Gold, you really did explore the world. You even needed to watch the map carefully to spot the flashing icon that indicated a native city. Today that would be considered a cheap interface trick. But because the decisions were so limited, you could actually focus on what was going on around you. Gauging how many supplies it would take you to make it back to the ships was somehow far more nerve-wracking than any single game mechanic you’ll find today because it forced you to focus on the environment in a way that’s impossible in modern games. It’s hard to think of a contemporary strategy game that’s simultaneously visceral and contemplative, yet the limitations of computer hardware in 1984 allowed Seven Cities of Gold to be both.

No one wants games to go back to being in two colors, or asterisk-landing exercises, or missing persons drills to locate Carmen Sandiego. However, as strategy games have become more complex, some of the sense of wonder has disappeared. The world looks much more real, but there is much less sense of place. Maybe that has to do with the part of the game you personalize by creating it in your head. Back then, this is what made you a dork.

Guess what? It still does.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #182 as part of its Revisionist History series of re-examinations of old games.