Decent Dialogue?
Getting married significantly affected the game?
And Lancer, if you don't think of Pirates! as a sim, then why did you just say it could be called one?
Besides, since we're playing the semantics game, I doubt many people would consider Civilization to be a SIM game either. Most people call it turn-based strategy.
EDIT: Fair enough points all around BTW. I guess I never really considered it an RPG because, at the time, there was really no other game like it.
I always thought of it as an open-ended adventure game, but that was over a decade ago.