In the autumn of 1971 Don Rawitsch, a history student at Carleton College in Minnesota, was teaching an eighth-grade class about the American West and needed something for the following week. He had sketched out a game on a map of the trail. He shared a flat with two fellow student teachers, Bill Heinemann, who taught mathematics, and Paul Dillenberger. Heinemann saw at once that the game would work on a computer, and the three wrote it in a couple of weeks on the Minneapolis schools’ time-sharing system. Pupils played it on a teletype, a typewriter-like terminal that printed every line on paper. When the teaching practice ended the program was deleted, and for three years The Oregon Trail existed only as a curled-up printout. Its later versions reached more North American schools than any other educational program, sold more than 65 million copies by the Strong National Museum of Play’s count, and gave generations of players a catchphrase: “You have died of dysentery.”
Fast facts
- Authors: Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, 1971.
- First used: 3 December 1971, in Rawitsch’s classes in the Minneapolis school district.
- Publisher: MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) from 1975.
- Printed listing: Creative Computing, May–June 1978, as OREGON.
- Best-known version: MECC’s graphical The Oregon Trail for the Apple II, 1985.
- Setting: a family of five travelling the 2,040 miles from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City in 1847, in the 1978 version.
- Sales: more than 65 million copies of all versions, according to the Strong National Museum of Play.
- Hall of Fame: inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016.
A program that survived on paper
Rawitsch told the story himself in Creative Computing in 1978. The program “was first implemented on the Minneapolis Schools timesharing system”, and when the practice teaching finished it “was removed from the Minneapolis system and remained only as a curled up listing until Don joined the MECC staff in 1974 and loaded it onto the MECC system”. By his later account he did it over Thanksgiving weekend, typing in some 800 lines from the printout. He then researched the trail properly, using diaries and histories of the journey to set the odds of each misfortune, and put the revised game on MECC’s network in 1975. Creative Computing published the full BASIC listing, a sample run and Rawitsch’s notes, so readers could type the game in themselves, including tables of what pioneers’ diaries recorded about each hazard. By then, the magazine noted, it had run on Hewlett-Packard, UNIVAC and Control Data computers.
What the 1978 game was like
The listing begins with $700 to spend after buying the wagon, and five things to spend it on: oxen, food, ammunition, clothing and “miscellaneous supplies”, which meant medicine and spare parts. Every two weeks of game time the player chose whether to hunt, push on or stop at a fort, and how well the family would eat. Then the program rolled for events: a fire in the wagon, a snakebite, a wagon swamped fording a river, bandits, a blizzard in the mountains, illness. Shooting was a typing test. “You will be told to type in a word (one that sounds like a gun shot),” the instructions warned, and the faster you typed BANG, BLAM, POW or WHAM and pressed Return, the better your aim. Claiming at the start to be an “ace marksman” made the time limit stricter. Heinemann remembered that “the faster they typed, the more meat they got”.
Rawitsch’s introduction did not pretend the subject was simple. To some people, he wrote, the trail stood for “conquering the frontier” and “the pioneer spirit”; to others it carried “the political overtones of the colonists and their descendents forcing out British imperialism and clearing away the native American Indians”. At the very least it was “the human stories of many individuals who, oblivious to historical trends, tried to survive in life as best they knew how”.
Computer Gaming World was not overawed. In 1983 it looked back on it as an early attempt at an educational adventure: “there was a game called OREGON TRAIL where you tried to lead a wagon train safely west. It was simple, but a step in the right direction.”
The Apple II versions
MECC moved its programs onto the Apple II, and Oregon went onto a disk of elementary-school programs in 1980. It soon became MECC’s most popular Apple II product. Commodore 64 owners got the journey too: MECC’s Expeditions collection for the Commodore 64 in 1986 included an Oregon Trail of 1847, and Commodore Power Play’s reviewer, a teacher, reported that “the biggest thrills were the hunting excursions”.
The version most people remember came in 1985. MECC rebuilt the game from scratch for the Apple II, with R. Philip Bouchard as designer, John Krenz as lead programmer and Charolyn Kapplinger as lead graphic designer. It added most of what players now quote: naming the members of your party, choosing a profession, stopping at landmarks, crossing rivers, hunting and carrying the meat back to the wagon, and watching party members fall ill with diseases including dysentery, die and get tombstones. Bouchard wrote that it soon reached more North American schools than any other educational program. In 1988 COMPUTE! listed it for grades five and up, on the Apple II, at $55.
After MECC
MECC brought the game to MS-DOS as Oregon Trail Deluxe in 1992, with mouse control, and a Windows version was in American mail-order adverts by 1994. When PC Gamer in Britain tried it that year, it found the game “pretty rubbish, but entertaining all the same”. Oregon Trail II followed in 1995, the year MECC’s chief executive said the original was still producing a third of the company’s revenue. That year SoftKey bought MECC, and as SoftKey became The Learning Company it released further editions, numbered third, fourth and fifth. The game outlived MECC itself.
Its creators were recognised late. Carleton College noted in 2021 that the three had been officially credited only about ten years earlier, and that they “didn’t make a dime for the original code”. In 2016 The Oregon Trail was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play, which calls it “perhaps the oldest continuously available video game ever made”. “We put the two disciplines together,” Rawitsch said, “and what came out was a technical simulation that helped kids understand history.”
Sources
- Don Rawitsch, “Oregon Trail”, Creative Computing vol. 4 no. 3, May–June 1978, pp. 132–139: the introduction and rationale (1971, refined 1975); the background (Carleton College, the Minneapolis time-sharing system, the “curled up listing”, MECC in 1974, the computers it ran on); the diary sources; the program listing and sample run (1847, the family of five, 2,040 miles, $900 less $200 for the wagon, the supplies, the events, the gunshot words, the marksmanship question). https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1978-05
- Computer Gaming World vol. 3 no. 4, July 1983, p. 43: “a step in the right direction”.
- Jack Emberly, “MECC Home Software Library”, Commodore Power Play vol. 5 no. 4, August/September 1986, pp. 36–38: Expeditions and the hunting.
- Fred D’Ignazio, “Kids, Computers, and Summer Vacation”, COMPUTE! issue 96, May 1988, pp. 22–25: The Oregon Trail for grades 5 and up, Apple II, $55.
- Computer Gaming World issue 117, April 1994, p. 72: mail-order advertisement listing Oregon Trail for Windows.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 8, July 1994, p. 80: the quotation.
- Carleton College, “Carl Creators of Oregon Trail Celebrate 50th Anniversary”, 2 December 2021 (web, secondary): 3 December 1971; the board game, the flat and the computer; the late credit; “didn’t make a dime”; Rawitsch’s quotation. https://www.carleton.edu/news/stories/carl-creators-of-oregon-trail-celebrate-50th-anniversary/
- Kevin Wong, “The Forgotten History of ‘The Oregon Trail,’ As Told By Its Creators”, Motherboard (Vice), 15 February 2017 (web, secondary): the teletype and the deadline; Thanksgiving 1974 and the 800 lines; typing “BANG” and Heinemann’s quotation; 65 million copies; the Hall of Fame. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-oregon-trail-as-told-by-its-creators/
- R. Philip Bouchard, “A Brief History of the Oregon Trail Game”, died-of-dysentery.com (web, secondary; Bouchard was the 1985 version’s designer): 1975 on MECC’s network; Elementary Volume 6 (1980); the 1985 version, its team and features; school use; Oregon Trail Deluxe (1992); Oregon Trail II and the revenue (1995); the later editions. https://www.died-of-dysentery.com/stories/brief-history.html
- The Strong National Museum of Play, World Video Game Hall of Fame, “The Oregon Trail” (web, secondary): inducted 2016; more than 65 million copies; “the oldest continuously available video game”. https://www.museumofplay.org/games/the-oregon-trail/
- For MECC’s history and SoftKey’s purchase, see the MECC entry and its sources.