The Oregon Trail just turned 50 years old. The game was released on December 3, 1971 by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger while attending Jordan Junior High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The game was originally played on teletype without the benefit of graphics.
Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger gave the game away for free to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium in 1974. The company developed a series of textual versions for systems including the Commodore 64
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