The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail is an educational strategy game in which the player leads a party of 19th-century settlers by covered wagon from Independence, Missouri, west to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, purchasing supplies, hunting for food, and weathering random misfortunes along the way.¹⁴¹⁶ First developed by three Minnesota student teachers in 1971 and later published by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, it became a decades-long fixture of American classrooms and is widely credited with launching the genre of educational gaming, or “edutainment”.⁸¹⁶ The game has reportedly sold more than 65 million copies and been played by hundreds of millions of students.¹²¹⁶

Origins in 1971

The game began as a concept in the mind of Don Rawitsch, a 21-year-old senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, who in the fall of 1971 was assigned to teach an eighth-grade U.S. history unit on 19th-century westward expansion.⁸¹² Wanting something more engaging than a textbook, Rawitsch sketched a board game on long sheets of butcher paper, laying out a map of the western United States and writing cards describing hazards such as snakebites, dysentery, and broken wagon wheels.⁹¹¹ He planned to advance players with dice or instructional cards.⁹

His two roommates and fellow student teachers, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger — both of whom taught math and had taken programming courses at Carleton — saw the map on the floor and proposed turning it into a computer program instead.⁸¹² Heinemann argued that a computer could account for how much a player spent on oxen and wagons and how heavy a load they carried, rather than relying on the pure luck of dice.⁸⁹ Rawitsch agreed, but told them he needed the game in under two weeks.⁸¹²

Working after school in a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School that housed the school’s teletype — an electromechanical typewriter connected by phone line to a distant mainframe — Heinemann and Dillenberger coded the game in BASIC, sometimes hauling the teletype home in the trunk of a car.⁸⁹ Heinemann tied the game’s randomness to geography, so that attacks were most likely on the western plains and cold weather in the mountains of Wyoming and Oregon, storing all events in a table of probabilities.⁸ Rawitsch supplied the historical content while the two math teachers built the program.⁸

The Oregon Trail debuted in Rawitsch’s classroom on December 3, 1971, when he rolled the teletype into the room and moved groups of students through the game.⁹¹² It was an immediate hit: students lined up before and after class to play, and because Rawitsch could reserve the machine for only a week, he had them play in groups, which fostered voting and division of labor.²⁹ To hunt, players typed the word “BANG” as quickly and accurately as they could.⁶⁹ At the end of the semester Rawitsch deleted the program from the time-share system, keeping only a printout of the roughly 800 lines of code.²⁹

Revival at MECC

A few years later Rawitsch joined the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a state agency created to bring computing to schools across Minnesota.⁶¹¹ In 1974 he typed the saved 1971 program back into MECC’s mainframe, and for the revision he read the diaries of actual trail travelers, keeping score of how often events such as bad weather occurred so he could set the game’s probabilities to match — for instance, building in a 15 percent chance of bad weather if diaries mentioned it on 15 percent of days.⁷¹¹ His research also led him to add a sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans, who in the game could approach a struggling party and share food or supplies, reflecting the assistance he found emigrants had frequently received.¹¹

The game, then titled OREGON, was made available to MECC users in 1975 and quickly became the most heavily used program in the consortium’s library, remaining so until MECC shut down its mainframe operations in 1983.⁶¹¹ Seven core concepts introduced in 1971 — including the repeating two-week cycle of travel, resource management, and random misfortunes — reappeared in every subsequent version.⁶

The 1985 Apple II version

When MECC sought a microcomputer to replace its mainframes, it chose the Apple II, and the graphical version of the game developed for it over ten months in 1984–85 became the most famous incarnation.¹¹¹⁴ Its lead designer and team leader was R. Philip Bouchard, who described the product not as a mere port but as a complete reimagining and MECC’s first product aimed primarily at home consumers rather than schools.¹¹⁴ This 1985 version — later also released on the IBM PC — was the first to feature actual graphics, colorful scenes, and an intricate interface, and it gave the game nationwide attention as out-of-state schools licensed it for a fee.¹¹¹

In the Apple II design, the player selects a profession — banker, carpenter, or farmer — each with a different difficulty and starting funds, names the party members, and buys oxen, food, clothing, ammunition, and spare parts at Matt’s General Store.¹⁴ The journey is divided into sixteen segments, each ending at a landmark such as a river crossing or fort, where the player chooses whether to ford, caulk the wagon, or pay for a ferry.¹⁴ The hunting component is a mini-game in which the player shoots animals for food, and performance is scored at the end.¹⁴¹⁶ Bouchard designed the game to appeal to players who preferred hunting, resource management, or coping with sudden misfortune alike.¹⁶

Legacy and controversy

The Oregon Trail was at one point the most widely distributed piece of software in North American schools, and Bouchard has attributed its lasting fame partly to the simple fact that most children played it at school.¹⁶ Its innovations became video-game staples: the game is credited with popularizing the idea of naming the members of one’s party, and its stock phrase “You have died of dysentery,” added in a later version, became a defining meme spawning t-shirts and countless internet references.¹²¹⁶ The title has been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame and referenced in Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which named the “Oregon Trail Generation”.¹⁴¹⁶

The three original creators never received royalties, and were not publicly credited as authors until 34 years after the game’s conception, at a gala celebrating the release of Oregon Trail II.¹¹ The game has also drawn sharp criticism for adopting a colonialist perspective on westward expansion and largely ignoring the indigenous peoples whose land was taken, with later iterations working to include their stories.¹⁶

The Oregon Trail - Launch Trailer - Nintendo SwitchNintendo of America

The franchise has spawned dozens of sequels, spinoffs, and parodies, an MS-DOS release in 1990, and modern remakes, including a 2022 version developed and published by Gameloft that blends pixel-art characters with 3D environments and reached storefronts such as Steam and the Nintendo Switch.¹⁴¹⁸¹⁹ A live-action film adaptation has also been announced.¹⁶