A faithful recreation of the original Oregon Trail game.
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 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.
- Oregon Trail (1978) - Original, BASIC
- The Oregon Trail
- Don Rawitsch Reddit AMA
- Don Rawitsch presentation
- A Brief History of the Oregon Trail Game
- Oregon Trail’s Co-Creator Didn’t Make Much Money. He Should Have Chosen to Be a Banker.
- The Forgotten History of 'The Oregon Trail,' As Told By Its Creators
- The History Behind The Oregon Trail
- How You Wound Up Playing ‘The Oregon Trail’ in Computer Class
- Oregon (lost original version of "The Oregon Trail" educational computer game; 1971)
- Creative Computing (May-June 1978, vol 4, no 3)