Ford the river or pay for a ferry, shoot enough buffalo to trigger an extinction event, name a character after a pet dog then look on in horror as they die of dysentery - all familiar experiences to those who grew up playing The Oregon Trail. This classic educational computer game, a mainstay on school computers ever since the 1970s, had a huge, if at the time subtle, impact on the development of the nascent video game industry. At the same time, Oregon Trail itself has evolved greatly, absorbing features from other video games and taking full advantage of breakthroughs in PC processing power, graphics, interfaces, and even branching narrative storytelling.

True to its title, the Oregon Trail "edutainment" video game series tries to simulate real-life 1830s history - specifically, the mass immigration of American settlers to Oregon and other territories in the Pacific Northwest. Players of the original Oregon Trail or its HD remake take control of a settler family with a covered wagon and freshly purchased set of oxen, traveling all the way from Missouri to Oregon's verdant Willamette Valley. To teach players about the real-life hardships of cross-country travel in the 1830s, players of Oregon Trail are challenged with mini-games such as rationing supplies, bartering with traders, hunting game, and random natural hardships such as dysentery and snake-bites.

The Unsung Innovators Who Created Oregon Trail For Their Classroom

An image of The Oregon Trail's retro computer graphics, all in green on a black screen.

The designer and programmers of the original Oregon Trail - Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, Paul Dillenberger - technically didn't earn a single cent from their highly influential creation. In various interviews, this trio of developers seems mostly content about its lack of royalties from the Oregon Trail educational game and franchise. The reason for their relative acquiescence is that they designed, promoted, and shared their ground-breaking game long before the full emergence of the video game industry. Additionally, the first version of Oregon Trail was made to be an educational tool for students in Minnesota schools - an experimental method for teaching history using nascent public computer technology.

The 1971 computer game The Oregon Trail, which debuted in a Minneapolis junior high class, was a completely text-based video game. Players - most of them students - typed commands into a teletype machine linked to a central computer server for the Minneapolis school district and read paper printouts with text describing events in the game, similar to the Colossal Cave Adventure text adventure game or the first-ever Star Trek game. The animal hunting segments of The Oregon Trail were simulated through a speed-typing challenge, a lot like the speed typing gameplay of The House of the Dead spin-off, The Typing of the Dead.

How Oregon Trail Became A Successful Computer Game Franchise

The text-based gameplay of a 1975 version of Oregon Trail.

The original 1971 The Oregon Trail was a smash hit with students, and when the time came to delete it from the Minneapolis school district's computer servers, Don Rawitsch and his associates printed out a paper copy of the game's source code, a common practice in the days before personal computers and portable storage mediums like CDs or floppy disks. After acquiring a position at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), which published educational software for schools - a modern example being Microsoft's Minecraft Education - Rawitsch shared the prototype Oregon Trail program with the non-profit company's bosses, who added it to their product line-up.

As this new 1975 version of Oregon Trail, updated to have more realistic random events, grew in popularity among computer classroom students and early video game players, MECC founded a for-profit branch of its company to publish and sell this and other edutainment games. Throughout the 1980s, MECC would publish updated versions of Oregon Trail on the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari 8-bit family of desktop computers. After MECC ceased to exist as an independent video game company, publishers such as The Learning Company and Game Loft published new iterations of Oregon Trail - some with more accurate depictions of Native Americans - for Windows, Macintosh, Android, iOS, and other platforms.

How Oregon Trail Evolved As Computer Technology Grew More Sophisticated

A screenshot of a 1980s version of The Oregon trail, showing a covered wagon being bulled by oxen nearing a river, with a prompt informing the player, "Genevieve has a broken leg."

As mentioned above, the earliest versions of Oregon Trail were essentially text adventure video games that players interacted with by typing text commands. This swiftly changed as the publishers of Oregon Trail distanced themselves from the old university computer system and started releasing versions of the game on personal computers. The 1985 Oregon Trail game, for instance, introduced colorful visual graphics, a simple soundtrack, and a much more intuitive interface based on selecting travel options from a numbered list. This version of Oregon Trail also introduced arcade style mini-games, like one for hunting, where players steer a rifle-toting character around a wilderness zone to shoot animals.

Future versions of Oregon Trail broadly mimicked the template established by the 1985 game, adding small but incremental innovations here and there. Macintosh and DOS editions, for instance, added mouse functionality. A reboot/sequel called Oregon Trail 2, released by MECCI in 1995, added an RPG-style skill system for the settler characters players created, along with other new gameplay mechanics such as talking to settlers, starting journeys at different points of the year, and foraging for wild fruits/vegetables. The hunting mini-game was also revamped from a top-down third-person to a first-person shooting game similar to Duck Hunt and other light shooter marksmanship games.

How Oregon Trail Unintentionally Pioneered Aspects Of Modern Video Game Design

A screenshot from a modern, high-definition remake of The Oregon Trail, showing the player's covered wagon traversing a landscape above stats for four characters at the bottom of the screen. On-screen prompts show Fort Boise is 15 miles to the West, and a character named Hannah has contracted Dysentery.

As one of the earliest computer games (right up there with Pong, Space War!, and early Dungeons & Dragons video game adaptations like dnd) The Oregon Trail pioneered many different video game mechanics and video game genre conventions. The randomized challenges and disasters players encounter in an Oregon Trail playthrough, such as the infamous dysentery character death scenario, may also be the earliest version of the "random encounter" mechanics seen in genre-defining JRPGs like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. Additionally, The Oregon Trail may well be one of the oldest example of survival video games such as Don't Starve, The Forest, or Minecraft, centering much of its core mechanics around building up and managing a finite inventory of resources.

Source: MinnMax/YouTube