Wave energy converters (WECs) need to be optimally controlled to be commercially viable. These controllers often require an estimate of the (unmeasurable) wave excitation force. To date, observers for WECs are often based upon ‘complex’ techniques, which are counter-intuitive in their design, additionally requiring an explicit model to describe the excitation as part of an (augmented) system. The latter imposes strong assumptions on the design of each observer, while also implying an additional computational burden associated with the necessity of augmenting the WEC model to include the dynamics of the input.We propose a simple and effective excitation force estimator based on linear time-invariant (LTI) theory, without the need for an explicit model of the input. In particular, we re-formulate the unknown-input estimation problem as a tracking control-loop, so that a wide-variety of LTI design techniques (arising from either classical or modern control theory) can be used to compute an estimate of the excitation force. We demonstrate performance, simplicity, and intuitive appeal of the proposed observer, by means of a case study based on a realistic computational fluid dynamics simulation, comparing the technique against a large set of WEC observers, showing that the approach is able to outperform available estimators.