The Oregon Trail (1971 video game) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids The Oregon Trail |
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Picture of teleprinter output of the game, featuring a single round of gameplay
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| Developer(s) | Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger |
| Publisher(s) | MECC |
| Series | The Oregon Trail |
| Platform(s) | Mainframe (HP 2100, CDC Cyber 70/73-26) PC (Apple II, Atari 8-Bit, Commodore 64) |
| Release date(s) | Original
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| Genre(s) | Strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
The Oregon Trail is a text-based strategy video game developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) beginning in 1975. It was developed by the three as a computer game to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. In the game, the player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon via a covered wagon in 1847. Along the way the player must purchase supplies, hunt for food, and make choices on how to proceed along the trail while encountering random events such as storms and wagon breakdowns. The original versions of the game contain no graphics, as they were developed for computers that used teleprinters instead of computer monitors. A later Apple II port added a graphical shooting minigame.
The first version of the game was developed over the course of two weeks for use by Rawitsch in a history unit in a Minneapolis junior high school. Despite its popularity with the students, it was deleted from the school district's mainframe computer at the end of the school semester. Rawitsch recreated the game in 1974 for the MECC, which distributed educational software for free in Minnesota and for sale elsewhere, and recalibrated the probabilities of events based on historical journals and diaries for the game's release the following year. After the rise of microcomputers in the 1970s, the MECC released several versions of the game over the next decade for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, and Commodore 64 computers, before redesigning it as a graphical commercial game for the Apple II under the same name in 1985.
The game is the first entry in The Oregon Trail series; games in the series have since been released in many editions by various developers and publishers, many titled The Oregon Trail. The multiple games in the series are often considered to be iterations on the same title, and have collectively sold over 65 million copies and have been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. The series has also inspired a number of spinoffs such as The Yukon Trail and The Amazon Trail.
Gameplay
The Oregon Trail is a text-based strategy video game in which the player, as the leader of a wagon train, controls a group journeying down the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon in 1847. The player purchases supplies, then plays through approximately twelve rounds of decision making, each representing two weeks on the trail. Each round begins with the player being told their current distance along the trail and the date, along with their current supplies. Supplies consist of food, bullets, clothing, miscellaneous supplies, and cash, each given as a number. Players are given the option to hunt for food, and in some rounds to stop at a fort to purchase supplies, and then choose how much food to consume that round. The game closes the round by randomly selecting one or two events and weather conditions. The events include storms damaging supplies, wagons breaking down, and attacks by wild animals or "hostile riders"; weather conditions can slow down the rate of travel, which can result in additional rounds needed to reach Oregon.
When hunting, or when attacked, the game prompts the player to type a word—"BANG" in the original version, or a randomly selected word like "BANG" or "POW" in later versions—with misspellings resulting in no effect. When hunting, the faster the word is typed, the more food is gathered. The game ends when the player reaches Oregon, or if they die along the trail; death can occur due to an attack or by running out of supplies. Running out of food results in starvation, while lack of clothing in cold weather, low levels of food, or random events such as snakebite or a hunting accident lead to illness; this results in death if the player does not have miscellaneous supplies for minor or regular illnesses, or cannot afford a doctor in the case of serious illnesses.
Legacy
The 1975 mainframe game was the most popular software in the system for Minnesota schools for five years, with thousands of players monthly. Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger were not publicly acknowledged as the creators of the original game until 1995, when MECC honored them in a ceremony at the Mall of America. By then, several versions of the game had been created. Rawitsch published the source code of The Oregon Trail in Creative Computing's May–June 1978 issue, along with some of the historical information he had used to refine the statistics. That year MECC began encouraging schools to adopt the Apple II microcomputer, purchasing large amounts at a discount and reselling them to schools. MECC began converting several of their products to run on microcomputers, and John Cook adapted the game for the Apple II; though the text-based gameplay remained largely the same, he added a display of the player's position along the trail on a map between rounds, and replaced the typing in the hunting and attack minigame with a graphical version in which a deer or attacker moves across the screen and the player presses a key to fire at it. A version for the Atari 8-bit family, again titled The Oregon Trail, was released in 1982. The Apple II version was included under the name Oregon as part of MECC's Elementary series, distributed to Minnesota schools for free and for profit to schools outside of the state, on Elementary Volume 6 in 1980. Oregon was ported to the Commodore 64 in 1984 as part of a collection like Elementary Volume 6 titled Expeditions. By the mid-1980s, MECC was selling their educational software to schools around the country, and The Oregon Trail was their most popular product by far.
In 1985, MECC produced a fully-graphical version of the game for Apple II computers, redesigned by R. Philip Bouchard as a greatly expanded product for home consumers under the same name. The Oregon Trail was extremely successful, and along with successive versions of the game it sold over 65 million copies. Several further games have been released in The Oregon Trail series, many under the title The Oregon Trail, as well as a number of spinoffs such as The Yukon Trail and The Amazon Trail.
The original Oregon Trail has been described in Serious Games and Edutainment Applications as "one of the most famous ancestors" of the serious game subgenre. The text-based and graphical versions of The Oregon Trail are often described as different iterations of the same game when discussing the game's legacy; Colin Campbell of Polygon, for example, has described it collectively as one of the most successful games of all time, calling it a cultural icon. Kevin Wong of Vice claimed that the collective game was "synonymous with edutainment". Due to its widespread popularity, The Oregon Trail, referring to all versions of the game released over 40 years, was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016. Time named the game as one of the 100 greatest video games in 2012, and placed it 9th on its list of the 50 best games in 2016.
See also
In Spanish: Oregon Trail (videojuego) para niños
