All Nine Privateer Bartenders... RANKED (February 25, 2017)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
Early inn Freedom Flight, Hunter opines that "species didn’t seem to matter; wherever there were fliers, there seemed to be a bar..." and Privateer's Gemini Sector seems to be ample proof! Every one of the game's regular bases features a variety of services; some boast ship dealers, others different guild halls... but every single one includes a bar in which the player can stop to hear news and rumors from a friendly bartender.


Privateer initially shipped on six 1.44 mb diskettes, which meant that there was no chance for the game to ever include 59 different sets of facial animations. Like other titles before the advent of the CD-ROM, Privateer had to fight for every bit, reusing and recombining art wherever possible to save space. Just as the game reuses base and ship art for different purposes, it uses just nine 'talking heads' to represent the bartenders at 59 bases!


Now, prepare to impress your friends with your amazing ability to identify these bartenders on sight by learning from our fast guide below. Never again will you accidentally confuse an Agricultural Planet Bartender with a Mining Base one! Leaving only the eternal question: is it the same bartender following you from base to base, or did they name it the Gemini Sector because there truly is a proliferation of twins?


Generic:








Agricultural Planet: Fifteen appearances at Elysia, Oresville, Burton, Victoria, Heimdel, Edom, Nitir, Surtur, Bodensee and Helen.
Mining Base: Twelve appearances at Romulus, Charon, Lisacc, Macabee, Saratov, Basque, Kronecker, Vishnu, Rygannon, Achilles, Hector and Valkyrie.
Pirate Base: He must be related to the Agricultural Base bartender! Note the sinister green eyes. Five appearances at Drake, Smallville, Oakham, Tuck's and Megiddo.
Pleasure Planet: We know, you remember her. Eight appearances at Matahari, N1912-1, Speke, New Reno, Magdaline, Olympus, Erewhon and Jolson.
Refinery: Fifteen appearances at Beaconsfield, Meadow, Thisbury, Wickerton, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Basra, Anapolis, Remus, Gracchus, Munchen, Rilke, Rodin and Joplin.






Unique: (left to right) New Constantinople, New Detroit, Oxford University Planet and Perry Naval Station

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Original update published on February 25, 2017
 
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Well, it worked for me - I would have thought there were more than nien different bartenders. Not much more but some more. Also, somehow it's strange to me that I have apparently only visited the pleasure bases of Speke and Jolson...


OTOH, I wouldn't have thought that there were that many different ship dealers. Sure, Oxofrd with its wood planking and maybe Perry.
 
Well, it worked for me - I would have thought there were more than nien different bartenders. Not much more but some more.
I'm the opposite - I thought there were less. And actually, looking at these images now, it's no wonder I thought there was fewer of them - while it wouldn't be fair to say that they all look the same, their similar hairstyles and lack of facial hair makes them all somewhat alike. Among the generics in particular, only the pleasure lady and the refinery guy really stand out. I wonder if originally the plan had been to allow random combinations of face parts for greater variety.
 
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