The Creation And Legacy Of The Oregon Trail Game

gamerant.com:

Many gamers and non-gamers alike have played or at least heard of The Oregon Trail. The original game debuted in a classroom in 1971 and its Apple Arcade release has come out 50 years later in 2021. In those 50 years, the little game created a huge legacy with various editions released and the development of very similar games like The Amazon Trail and The Yukon Trail.

This old game had very humble beginnings, starting with an eighth-grade history student teacher in Minnesota. His name was Don Rawitsch, and he, with the help of fellow student teachers and friends Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, created what would later be one of the most well-known historical games.

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The computer program was written on an HP Time-Shared BASIC which ran on a HP 2100 minicomputer. Once the game was completed, it went live in Rawitsch's class. With Oregon Trail's mechanics of hunting, overseeing supplies, random events, sickness, and more, the game was incredibly popular for the class. They could learn about history in the form of a game, and while many games would later have historical settings,The Oregon Trail was one of the first to do this. This version of the game was entirely text-based.

Three years later, Rawitsch was hired by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). They sought to create educational software for classroom purposes, so Rawitsch worked more on the game through his new job. MECC thus became the known developer of the game and sharedThe Oregon Trail with schools state-wide. In the late 70s, the game went country-wide, and in 1985, the game got its visuals, no longer being just text-based.

By the 1990s, MECC was incredibly successful, but the