Oregon Trail, originally developed by MECC, is an educational computer game that simulates the experience of 19th-century pioneers traveling from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Players take on the role of a wagon leader guiding a group of settlers across the harsh American frontier, making decisions about supplies, travel pace, and routes while facing challenges such as dysentery, starvation, dysentery, river crossings, dysentery, snake bite and dysentery.
The game aims to teach players about the difficulties of westward expansion while combining strategy, resource management, and historical context, making it both engaging and educational for generations of players.
There have been numerous editions of this game released, but the one we’re going to be mainly discussing is the version released for the Apple II in 1985.
Hard Tack and Salted Pork
Food and supply management play an important role in the game. To introduce some arcade-style elements, players can stop at any time during their journey to hunt for food. This takes place in a 2D top-down interface, similar to that of a twin-stick shooter.
A common rifle on the Oregon Trail was the Hawken rifle, a sturdy, percussion-cap muzzleloader favored for its reliability and power. Built by the Hawken brothers in St. Louis during the 1830s and 1840s, it fired a large .50 to .54-caliber ball, making it effective for hunting buffalo, elk, and deer. Its shorter, heavier barrel made it easier to handle from horseback or a wagon compared to the older long rifles, and its rugged construction held up well to months of rough travel.
Of course, in the game, your rifle might as well be a fully automatic Maxim gun with the way that you can spin 360 degrees, leaving behind a field littered with the corpses of entire generations of animals. Amusingly, no matter how many living things you slaughtered, you were limited to only taking back 100 lbs to the wagon. Let the rest serve as a warning to the others.
Come hell or high water
Now let’s get to another thing that was very common in the game: the crossing of the rivers. Periodically in the game, you encountered various bodies of water that you’ll need to figure out how to cross. The game usually presents you with the following choices:
- Ford the river
- Caulk the wagon and float across
- Pay for a ferry (not always available)
The rate of success depends on a number of variables, including the weather, wagon weight, the depth of the river, and also if God hates you.
I’d love to see a variation of the game, the Mel Brooks edition, where you can control the fuel-air mixture equivalent of your oxen rations throughout your travels. If you feed them a steady diet of beans, then there’s a higher chance of being able to float the wagon across by using the bloated oxen as biological ballast tanks, but party morale suffers throughout the journey. 💨
Further Reading
The original team leader, R. Philip Bouchard for the quintessential Apple II version of Oregon Trail has an entire set of pages devoted to the development, refinement and production of the game on his website. It’s a fantastic read if you’re at all interested in some of the more technical aspects and a deeper dive into the original’s design and implementation.