What is The Oregon Trail game?
The Oregon Trail is a computer game about traveling west by covered wagon in the 1840s. You buy supplies, decide how fast to travel and how much food to hand out, and choose how to cross each river. Then you try to get your wagon party all the way to Oregon. Along the way, things go wrong, as they did for the pioneers: people get sick, wagons break and rivers run high. The first version was made in 1971 to help students learn about the pioneers, and the game has been rebuilt many times since.
How it started
The game began in Minnesota. In 1971 Don Rawitsch was a senior at Carleton College, studying history and working as a student teacher in an eighth-grade history class at Jordan Junior High School in Minneapolis. His class was about to study the move west, and he wanted something more interesting than the usual lessons. So he started planning a board game, with a big map of the trail and cards for the things that could happen to settlers along the way.
His roommates, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, were student teachers too, and both had learned to program in BASIC. When they saw his map, they suggested making it a computer game instead. A program could keep track of each group's money and supplies and work out what happened next, with no need to roll dice. The two of them wrote it in about two weeks, much of it at night at the school where they taught, and Rawitsch's students played it for the first time on December 3, 1971.
There was no screen. Students typed their choices on a teletype, a typewriter-like machine connected to the school district's central computer, an HP 2100 minicomputer, and the game's answers came back printed on paper. The school had only one teletype, so Rawitsch split his classes into groups that took turns. The students organized themselves: one typed, one followed the map, one kept an eye on the supplies.
From one classroom to a whole state
When their student teaching ended, the three printed out the program and deleted it from the computer, and the game might have stopped there. In 1974 Rawitsch went to work for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a state agency that ran a computer network for Minnesota schools. Over Thanksgiving that year he typed the old printout back in, about 800 lines. Then he adjusted how often things like bad weather and broken wagons happened at each part of the trail, using diaries and accounts written by emigrants.
He also changed how Native Americans appeared. The first version had borrowed from old Western movies, and other teachers had already asked the three to take out the worst of it. Rawitsch's reading showed that Native people had often helped travelers on the trail, and the game came to show that too. In 1975 MECC made the game, simply called OREGON, available to schools across Minnesota, and it quickly became the most popular program on the network.
Players still hunted by typing the word BANG as fast as they could. By the late 1970s the word could also be POW, BLAM or WHAM, so you never knew which one was coming. In 1978 Rawitsch printed the whole program in Creative Computing magazine, and people began adapting it for the new personal computers.
The Apple II years
MECC started selling Apple II computers to Minnesota schools at a discount, and by 1980 it was sending out an Apple II version of OREGON on a disk called Elementary Volume 6. It was still mostly text, but hunting now showed a simple picture of an animal, and you fired by pressing a key. Soon schools outside Minnesota could buy licenses for MECC's software, and the disk spread across North America.
In 1984 MECC decided to build a new Oregon Trail from scratch, this time for families buying computers for their homes. R. Philip Bouchard led a small team: John Krenz programmed it, Charolyn Kapplinger drew the pictures and Shirley Keran helped with the research. After ten months of work, the new game came out in 1985.
This is the Oregon Trail most people picture. It introduced almost everything the game is known for: choosing to be a banker, a carpenter or a farmer, Matt's General Store, landmarks, river crossings, hunting with a rifle on the screen, diseases with names like dysentery, and a tombstone when a trip ends badly. Schools pushed MECC to include it in their licenses, and Bouchard writes that for several years in the 1980s it was the program found most often in schools in the United States and Canada.
New computers, new versions
MECC kept bringing the game to new computers. An MS-DOS version for IBM PCs followed in 1988, and an updated edition with more colorful pictures came a couple of years later. In 1991 MECC made its first version you could play with a mouse, a black-and-white game for the Macintosh. That same year a networked Mac game called Wagon Train 1848 let a whole class travel together, with each computer a wagon in the train.
In 1992 the Macintosh design came to MS-DOS in full color as The Oregon Trail Deluxe. It brought VGA graphics, digitized sound effects, MIDI music and mouse controls, and eight occupations instead of three. Deluxe is the version you can play on this site. A Windows version followed in 1993, and that same year The Oregon Trail became MECC's first CD-ROM product. By the mid-1990s the game brought in about a third of MECC's yearly revenue of roughly $30 million.
Oregon Trail II and the later editions
In 1995 MECC released Oregon Trail II, a much bigger game designed by Wayne Studer. You could pick any year from 1840 to 1860, choose among 25 occupations, and follow the Oregon, California or Mormon trails from several starting towns. Later that year the software company SoftKey agreed to buy MECC, and SoftKey soon took the name The Learning Company. The 3rd, 4th and 5th Editions of The Oregon Trail followed in 1997, 1999 and 2001.
MECC also sent players on other journeys: The Amazon Trail (1993), The Yukon Trail (1994) and Africa Trail (1995), with new Amazon Trail games in 1996 and 1998. MECC's offices in Minnesota closed in 1999, the same year the toy company Mattel bought The Learning Company.
The game has kept coming back since, as a handheld electronic game in 2018 and as a new version from Gameloft on Apple Arcade in 2021, among others. Counting every version, The Oregon Trail has sold more than 65 million copies.
Why it stuck
The game does not go easy on you. Push the oxen too hard, pack too little food or ford a river that is too deep, and people in your party can die. Because your choices matter, you pay attention, and you remember what happened.
It is also built on history. Independence Rock, Fort Laramie and South Pass are landmarks emigrants wrote about, and a little past South Pass the trail split in two, just as the game asks you to choose a route there. Cholera, measles and typhoid, which can strike your party in the game, killed emigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. The game simplifies a lot, of course, but it gets the big picture right: disease was the greatest danger on the trail.
“You have died of dysentery”
For many people who were children in the 1980s and 1990s, The Oregon Trail was one of the first computer games they ever played, often in a school computer lab. Time magazine wrote in 2016 that it “helped introduce an entire generation (several, in fact) to video games.” Its hazards became shared memories: the broken axle, the river that was deeper than it looked, the 100 pounds of meat you could carry back from a hunt, and above all the line “You have died of dysentery.” The line ended up on T-shirts and in jokes all over the internet, and Bouchard used it as the title of his 2016 book about making the game. On the trail itself, cholera was the deadlier disease.
In 2015 the writer Anna Garvey even gave a name to the people who grew up with it: the Oregon Trail Generation, for those who played the game as kids before the internet was everywhere.
Honors
The three creators were not publicly recognized until 1995, when MECC honored Rawitsch, Heinemann and Dillenberger at a celebration at the Mall of America. In 2016 The Oregon Trail was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. It was the first educational game to join the Hall, and the museum calls it the longest-published and most successful educational game of all time. Time named it one of the 100 greatest video games in 2012 and ranked it number 9 on its list of the 50 best video games in 2016.