You are correct! Yes, that’s the set.
I don’t think I ever got it - I gawked at it in the store, having seen the set in the LEGO Racers video game.
The largest set I had was a castle set - either this one or one like it:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0279/5615/0355/products/6078-1_1200x1200.png?v=1623431371
There was also this one, which was much less of a build:
I had that one as a kid. I remember that one of the punched holes in the sail tore almost immediately and I tried repairing it by stapling it. Didn’t work all that well.
For anyone after a hit of nostalgia, Brickset has a comprehensive data base of all Lego sets released.
This was Islanders, which was only a sub-theme of the larger Pirates theme. The big Lego themes at the time were Town, Castle & Space, and outside that were stuff like Pirates (quite popular, and fairly long-lived) and other smaller/shorter-lived themes like Aquazone (a lot like Space, but underwater) and Adventurers (the Indiana Jones/Mummy/dieselpunk one, the Elephant Caravan set is one of those)
One of those themes never went away (Town became City, basically) but even Space and Castle were discontinued, except for standalone or Creator-theme nostalgia-milking sets.
I think I vaguely remember Aquazone too!
I got into LEGOs a bit later on, probably around 11 or 12. My first love was Playmobil.
I didn’t have a ton of the big sets or anything; my parents felt those were too pricey for children’s toys; but I’d get the small sets, that were just a handful of people and an armor rack, or a small group of soldiers with a cannon.
I had a couple of vikings, some “cowboys and indians”, a trio of Union soldiers with a hefty cannon that actually fires, a knight with barding for his horse and some squires… and a single scifi alien in a space suit, from a relative that knew I liked Playmobil but not necessrily what kind 
Some of the figures I recognize:
I think this was the first set I remember having:
The heavily armored “good guy” knight:
And some Northern Artillery:
My proudest acquisition though was a ruined keep that came with a bandit clan:
Endless hours of fun as various groups fought back and forth over the keep!
Oh my gosh! I adored Playmobil, I had all those sets! Mainly knights & castles, but I had a smattering of the Civil War and Western stuff too. My favorite set was the Baron’s Battle Tower, I still vividly remember the birthday when I got it.
I especially love the dark, moody photography they did for those old medieval sets. I think that aesthetic contributed a lot to my love of miniatures.
Yes, for sure! Despite only having a handful of sets I’d spend hours looking through the catalogs included in the boxes just looking at those photos.
In my Lego days, Legoland was just Town and Space, and then I remember when they introduced Castle. By the time they introduced Pirate (I think that was the next one), I had aged out of the primary demographic.
There were also sets that weren’t part of those themes. IIRC, the trains were their own thing (though of course, easily integrated with Town). And of course, there was also Technic (which was usually present-day, but usually larger scale than Town).
And Playmobil was about a lot more than knights and castles. One happy Christmas I got my toddler son a Playmobil electric train set (below). In the same spirit as Lego interoperability, the Playmobil train ran on the same G-scale track as the adult-grade LGB train sets and accessories. So we had lots of fun buying LGB track and switches from a local hobby store and building a railway that ran through half the upper floor of the house, as well as LGB cars and accessories that were all fully compatible.
Yeah, I have to agree with this. Yes, there are some highly specialized parts like aircraft cockpits and canopies and printed parts. But those are usually one of hundreds of parts in even the most specialized sets. From what I’ve seen, even the most complex sets break down into standard bricks, plates, ramps, angles, joints, technics, and other parts. It’s just that builds no longer look like Minecraft-like stacks of bricks (except for the Minecraft sets of course).
That’s why my sibs and I were not allowed to have them.
My nieces were, and yes, they do make pastel LEGO sets marketed to girls.
(As an aside, before my brother and his wife had those girls, they agreed that their house would be a Barney-free zone. They did get a Baby Bop doll in a bag of stuffed animals, and allowed it because it wasn’t that loathsome purple dinosaur.)
I can only imagine how greasy those legos must have been. Yuck
It’s amazing how sets have become more complex with time. In spaceships from the 80’s, a pilot seat was just an L-shaped piece - but in, say, the Avengers Quinjet set, the seat is made of at least 8 different smaller pieces. It’s like that with everything. The modern LEGO approach seems to be, why use 1 piece when you can use 5?
I have LEGO from before I was born, 48 years ago. My 6 year old son pulled me out of bed yesterday to build a windmill out these old blocks and pieces of techno that are 30 years old. We succeeded.
LEGO is an amazing tool for imaginative kids, and fun to do with both my son and my 8 year old daughter.
I buy them the kits, they build the thing in the instructions, I compliment them, then it is total free-form after that.
I do disagree with single purpose pieces, which has become more common, especially with the commercial trade arrangements, eg, Star Wars LEGO and other franchises.
I found a “hot dog” piece in a set I gave my son which can be held by a LEGO man but it not conceivably useful in any model (or imagined model) that does not include the BBQ that was ancillary to the box I gave him.
My LEGO is so old that I have these pieces (and my kids still use them) from well before I was even born.
That’s the beauty of “The System”. Every piece made under the concept (almost 70 years now) should be compatible with any other piece. It’s wild to think a Lego brick from 1955 can be tossed into a bunch of current bricks and work the same, excepting wear.
That said, some of the Technic stuff has also gotten a bit out of hand with the co-branding and such though the actual gears and shafts and individual bits are still great. It’s hard for me to accept some people grow out of thinking that designing and building Lego robots is just really, really cool
OTOH for those of us of a certain age, where simple brick-shaped bricks in 3 or 4 lengths was all there ever was, building anything but a boxy “pixelated” blob was simply impossible. And so was, and still is, unthinkable.
A Lego gear or wheel? That was 10-15 years in the future for little me.
They still use the L shaped chair part for lots of stuff. I’m just amazed that the parts from my 40+ year old sets are essentially exactly the same as the ones they use on modern sets.
My son was telling me about the SNOT concept (Studs Not On Top). Basically the idea is you can make a lot of really complicated looking builds with standard bricks by combining them with these various parts that have studs on the side.