A series, not a single game
The Oregon Trail began in 1971 as a text-only game made by three student teachers in Minnesota: Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger. They wrote it for Rawitsch's eighth-grade history class. In 1975 the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) put it on the computer network it ran for Minnesota schools, where it became the most popular program on the network.
In 1985 a MECC team led by R. Philip Bouchard rebuilt the game for the Apple II with color pictures, and that version became a favorite in schools across the country. It came to MS-DOS computers in 1988 and to the Macintosh in 1991. The Oregon Trail Deluxe followed in 1992, with new color pictures and mouse controls, and it is the version you can play on this site. After that came a Windows version (1993), Oregon Trail II (1995), and the 3rd, 4th and 5th Editions (1997, 1999 and 2001). MECC also made spinoff games that send you on other journeys: up the Amazon River, to the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon, and across Africa by bicycle.
Together, the Oregon Trail games have sold more than 65 million copies. In 2016 The Oregon Trail was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, and that same year Time magazine ranked it number 9 on its list of the 50 best video games of all time. To learn how it all began, read our short history of The Oregon Trail game.
