The Oregon Trail (1971 video game)

The Oregon Trail
DOS Cover art
Developer(s)	MECC
Publisher(s)	Brøderbund The Learning Company Gameloft
Platform(s)	Android; Apple II, iOS, Macintosh; BlackBerry; Commodore 64; DOS; Facebook; Java ME; Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3DS, Wii; Windows, Mobile, Phone 7
Release	1971, 1974, 1985, 1992, 1996, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2011
Genre(s)	Simulation

Screenshot from the Apple II version

The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding his or her party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley on the Oregon Trail via a covered wagon in 1848. The game has been released in many editions by various developers and publishers who have acquired rights to it, as well as inspiring a number of spinoffs and parodies.

History

In 1971 Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught a grade 8 history class as a student teacher. He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on an HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help.

The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on 3 December 1971. Despite bugs, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to others on Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service. When the next semester ended, however, Rawitsch deleted the program, although he printed out a copy of the source code.

MECC

In 1974 Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a state-funded organization that developed educational software for the classroom, hired Rawitsch. He added many historically accurate features and uploaded The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota. The game became one of the network's most popular programs, with thousands of players monthly.

In 1978 MECC began encouraging its schools to adopt the Apple II microcomputer. The first published version of The Oregon Trail was in Creative Computing's May–June 1978 issue. It was written in BASIC 3.1 for the CDC Cyber 70/73-26. The program was then adapted by John Cook for the Apple II, and provided on A.P.P.L.E.'s PDS Disk series #108. A further version called Oregon Trail 2 was adapted in June, 1978 by J.P. O'Malley. The game was further released as part of MECC's Elementary series, on Elementary Volume 6 in 1980. The game was titled simply Oregon, and featured minimal graphics. It proved so popular that it was re-released as a standalone game, with substantially improved graphics, in 1985.

By 1995 The Oregon Trail comprised about one third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue. An updated version, Oregon Trail Deluxe, was released for DOS in 1992, followed by Oregon Trail II in 1995, The Oregon Trail 3rd Edition in 1997, and 4th and 5th editions. As of 2011, more than 65 million copies of The Oregon Trail have been sold.

Editions

• 1981–85 The Oregon Trail (Apple II)
• 1990 The Oregon Trail: Classic Edition (Macintosh)
• 1992 The Oregon Trail Deluxe (DOS)
• 1993–96 The Oregon Trail Ver 1.2 (Windows)
• 1996 Oregon Trail II (Windows)
• 1997 The Oregon Trail 3rd Edition (Windows)
• 2001 The Oregon Trail 4th Edition (Windows)
• 2002 The Oregon Trail 5th Edition (Windows)
• 2009 The Oregon Trail (DSiware)
• 2011 The Oregon Trail (Wii)
• 2011 The Oregon Trail (3DS)
• 2011 The Oregon Trail: American Settler (iOS, Android)
• 2012 The Oregon Trail (Windows Phone)

Gameplay

Hunting

An important aspect of the game was the ability to hunt. Using guns and bullets bought over the course of play, players select the hunt option and hunt wild animals to add to their food reserves. In the original version, there were no graphics and players were timed on how fast they could type "BANG," "WHAM," or "POW," with misspelled words resulting in a failed hunt. In the first full-graphics version, players controlled a little man who could aim a rifle in one of eight directions and fire single shots at animals. In later versions, players hunted with a cross-hair controlled by the mouse. Bison were the slowest moving targets and yielded the most food, while rabbits and squirrels were fast and offered very small amounts of food. Deer (eastern section) and elk (western section) were in the middle in terms of speed, size, and food yield; bears were between bison and deer in all three properties. While the amount of wild game shot during a hunting excursion is limited by only the player's supply of bullets, the maximum amount of meat that can be carried back to the wagon is 100 pounds in early versions of the game. In later versions, as long as there were at least two living members of the wagon party, 200 pounds could be carried back to the wagon. In the later version, players could hunt in different environments. For example, hunting during winter would result in graphics showing grass covered in snow. In later versions, the over-hunting of animals would result in "scarcity" and reduce the amount of animals which appeared later in the game.

Death

Throughout the course of the game, members of the player's party could fall ill and die from various causes, such as measles, snakebite, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and exhaustion. People could also die from drowning or a broken leg. The player's oxen were also subject to illness and death. In the Oregon Trail 2/OT2 for PC and later releases, when a member of the player's party dies, the player has the option of conducting a brief funeral: If the player elects to do so (as the game's instructions and in-game advisers strongly recommend in all but the very harshest environments), the player may write a tombstone epitaph for the party member before continuing down the trail; if the player declines to hold a funeral, the party suffers a severe blow to morale.

Scoring

At the conclusion of the journey, a player's score is determined in two stages. In the first stage, the program awards a "raw" or unscaled number of points for each remaining family member (weighted by party health), each remaining possession (weighted by type), and remaining cash on hand (one point per dollar). In the second stage, the program multiplies this raw score by a "degree of difficulty" scalar corresponding to the party's initial level of resources (determined in-game by the profession of the party's leader); for example, in the Apple IIe game, a banker starting with $1600.00 receives no bonus, the final score of a carpenter starting with $800.00 is doubled, and the final score of a farmer starting with $400.00 is tripled.

Legacy

The game was popular among North American elementary school students in the mid 1980s to late 1990s. Most students in the United States and Canada had access to the game at school. MECC followed up on the success of The Oregon Trail with similar titles such as The Yukon Trail and The Amazon Trail. The original title has been re-released many times, for different platforms and on different media; it is currently up to the fifth edition.

The phrase "You have died of dysentery" has been popularized on T-shirts and other promotional merchandise.

Another popular phrase from the game is "Here lies andy; peperony and chease," which is a player-generated epitaph featured on an in-game tombstone saved to a frequently pirated copy of the game disk.

In 2007, Thule corporation created Thule Trail as a promotional tool. It changed the starting location to Chicago, Illinois, the destination to the "Atlantis Music Festival" in Santa Barbara, California, wildlife to snacks, and made other modern adjustments. In 2008, the band Fall Out Boy released a similarly altered version of the game, "Fall Out Boy Trail," to promote the release of the Folie à Deux.

The game resurfaced in 2008 when Gameloft created an updated version for cell phones. A new release for the iPhone and iPod Touch is also available from Gameloft. The game went live in the iTunes App Store on March 11, 2009. On January 7, 2010, the Palm webOS version was released to the Palm App Catalog. On November 11, 2010, an Xbox Live version was released on Windows Phone 7. The game was featured in the web comic xkcd on August 14, 2009.

The cell phone version of the game is similar to the original, but varies in that the player can choose one of three different wagons: A basic wagon, a prairie schooner or a Conestoga wagon. The player can also choose to become a banker, a carpenter, or a farmer, each of which has unique benefits. Unlike the computer version of the game, players in the iPhone and iPod Touch version do not need to buy guns and bullets. The game has received a major update, which had the player using trading and crafting to upgrade their wagon, buy food, and cure ailments.

On February 2, 2011, a new version of the game was released on the social networking site Facebook. This version was removed from Facebook when Blue Fang Games closed.

In 2012, a parody called The Organ Trail was released by the Men Who Wear Many Hats for browsers, iOS, and Android, with the setting changed to human survivors fleeing a zombie apocalypse.

In 2012 The Willamette Heritage Center and the Statesman Journal newspaper in Salem, Oregon created Oregon Trail Live as a live action event. Teams compete as they master 10 challenges on the grounds of the WHC. Challenges are based loosely on the game: hunting for game becomes shooting nerf guns at college students wearing wigs and cloth antlers and carrying 200 pounds of meat becomes pulling a 200 pound man up a hill in a child's red wagon while he recites historical meat facts and points out choice cuts. Independence, Missouri is at one end of the grounds and the Willamette Valley is at the other end.Teams must pass a homesteader's exam of Oregon Trail facts gathered on their journey to build a home on their donation land claim. Prizes are awarded for historical enthusiasm, most adorable homestead, best funeral dirge, keeping up the grueling pace and having the worst trail experience. Oregon Trail Live is repeated every September at the WHC. www.oregontraillive.com and www.willametteheritage.org

See also

• Amazon Trail
• Freedom!
• Oregon Trail II
• Yukon Trail

References

• The Oregon Trail (Original) at MobyGames
• The Oregon Trail (Remake) at MobyGames
• Educational Software Classics: Interview with Don Rawitsch, the original designer of The Oregon Trail.
• GameSpot: The Oregon Trail
• Gaming Our Way Through History: A thorough exploration of the game and its implications.
• The Making of The Oregon Trail Presentation: Video presentation of Oregon Trail for Apple IIe with some of the original developers from MECC.
• On the Trail of the Oregon Trail: Historical findings on the original HP-2100 versions of the game. Includes BASIC source of a version from March 1975 and information on playing the game in its 1975 form via telnet.
• Westward Ho!: BASIC source code of an early version of the game.
• Westward!: Online adaptation of an early version of the game.