This Week in Retro: The Oregon Trail [1985]

September 1985: The Oregon Trail Teaches America's Youth About Dysentery 

by Diamond Feit

We can't be sure of the exact date, but we know for certain that the most important video game in American history celebrates the 35th anniversary of its commercial release this year. We're in September now, which makes this as good a time as any to celebrate a classic title that defined a genre and influenced an entire generation of children—quite literally, as it turns out. Kids of a certain age (too young to be "Gen X" but too old be branded "Millennials") have been dubbed "the Oregon Trail generation."

Oh, did you think I was talking about Super Mario Bros, which also came out that exact month? You're wrong, but I forgive you.

In 1985, video games were extremely young, despite already having a solid decade of fame and several pop-culture moments in the sun. Arcades were popular, if a little disreputable. Atari, Colecovision, and Intellivision were all on the market, but the 1983 crash had left them all in a state of uncertainty. In other words, the target audience was happy to play games, but their Boomer parents were less than enthusiastic about their kids' interests.

There was, of course, another significant sector of the video game market: Computer games. As the 1980s progressed, the idea of an ordinary suburban family owning their own computer became increasingly less like a science-fiction flight of fancy. These machines were hardly cheap; the "affordable" Commodore 64 cost $595 at launch (about $1600 in American dollars today with inflation), but it seemed affordable in contrast to competing systems, which cost twice as much.

Still, there was a clear movement in the United States to transform computers from fantasy technology into everyday tools, and that change took place largely in schools. 1985 just happened to be the year my elementary school opened its new computer lab: A space where children could learn the basics of operating an Apple II while also learning how to type, a skill that had long been considered secretarial but was fast becoming a universal need. Indeed, I've had to operate a computer as a normal part of every job I've ever held, which definitely wasn't the case for my parents!

However, as exciting as computers seem to impressionable children, all work and no play can turn even a glimpse of the future into a humdrum routine. Learning to type is as a repetitive task as learning to do long division; even with a computer involved, the magic dwindles quickly. Speaking as both a teacher and as a parent, I know the importance of offering kids a dangling carrot as incentive for completing necessary chores. In my 2020 household, that carrot is an iPad and access to an infinite amount of YouTube videos. 35 years ago, in that computer classroom, my own carrot was The Oregon Trail.

What few kids knew at the time, and possibly few adults know today, is that the video game known as The Oregon Trail has its roots in 1971 alongside other pioneering (as it were) works in gaming history. Created by three college students, the original version of The Oregon Trail was entirely text-based and operated via a teleprinter connected to a mainframe computer inside the Minneapolis school district offices. The program simulated a 19th-century covered wagon journey to Oregon by triggering random events and prompting players to choose whether to hunt for food, stop to rest, or continue onward. The game lasted until the player completed their trip to Oregon or until the trip killed them.

The Oregon Trail was written in BASIC and was later shared state-wide (and eventually nationwide) by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC. Eventually, the game's entire code was printed in Creative Computing magazine, leading to ports to a variety of early home computers. By 1984, the 13-year-old program was still widely available and had been tweaked to include some graphical elements, most notably in the process of hunting now involved a degree of aiming/timing whereas it had previously required nothing more than typing "BANG" as quickly as possible. But "available" is not the same as "competitive," so MECC decided to create an all-new version for the modern home market.

Yes, home market: According to project leader R. Philip Bouchard, MECC hoped to sell The Oregon Trail as a standalone product, which meant it had to be redesigned from the ground up and include graphics and sound that would appeal to modern audiences. In a 2017 Medium post, Bouchard wrote "I was told to take the original concept and run with it. I was to expand upon the original concept, building a much more elaborate and robust game. I could do so in any way that I saw fit, provided that I preserved whatever magic had made the original so popular." The only catch was it had to run on the Apple II, by far the most popular computer in American public schools at the time. In other words, MECC wanted to target computer users at large but knew that The Oregon Trail had to remain accessible to school kids as well.

While the 1985 incarnation of The Oregon Trail retained the core concept of the text version (the player still travels to Oregon and encounters a series of random events while stopping at landmarks along the way), much had changed. People became a focal part of the game:  The storekeep at the beginning has a name and a face, random travelers at landmarks can offer advice or trade supplies, and most importantly, the player makes the trip as a party of five and assigns everyone a name. When a random calamity or illness hits, that casualty is identified. And should the entire party get wiped out, a tombstone with a player-written epitaph is added to the trail where they fell.

The Oregon Trail is, on its face, an educational product—the "edutainment" label is a perfect fit—but it didn't just teach kids about American history. It also introduced millions of children to game design. Players get to choose a profession at the start of the game, which determines how much money is available at the start, a stealth primer on both difficulty and privilege. Players engage in risk/reward choices like setting their own pace of travel and food consumption, as well as choosing how and when to cross rivers. Hunting for food is an action game in miniature, but it's also a lesson in resource management: No matter how many animals they shoot, players can only carry so many pounds of meat to their wagon (which itself has a limited capacity).

In a way, The Oregon Trail was Junior's First Rogue-like: The landmarks and destination do not change, but the fact that so much of the game is randomly generated and death is permanent makes each playthrough unique. This was an intentional change on the part of Bouchard: "For the home market, I needed to design a product that a child could visit over and over—and it would still be interesting after 20 or 30 or 40 hours of play," he wrote on Medium. For us kids in school, The Oregon Trail was a race against time as well as the elements. Once our MasterType practice was finished, could we reach Oregon before the end-of-period bell rang? Or would we end up as a tombstone recorded on a communal disk? And if so, what message would we impart to our classmates? Something ribald, no doubt!

In hindsight, it is an astonishing coincidence that Super Mario Bros. and The Oregon Trail arrived in the U.S. so close together. Both works have a massive legacy in the medium as the former revolutionized console games, giving Nintendo a flag to plant that would secure its position for decades to come. But The Oregon Trail, by challenging children with new gameplay concepts while they attended school, fostered in them a lifelong fascination with games and computers in general, even for those who might never have willingly sought out such an interest.

The Oregon Trail '85 is itself a landmark on our collective journey towards a technological society. MasterType may have taught me where all the letters are on the keyboard, but hunting buffalo is the reason I remember their positions. The Oregon Trail remains available to this day (you can play it your browser), and while its graphics and sounds are certainly dated, its message is timeless: Rich people play life on easy mode and deserve fewer rewards at the end.