Hey kids, anyone remember 1985? It was a great year. I was 4 years old. The number one song in the country was Careless Whisper by Wham!. The top selling movie was Back to the Future. Mike Tyson wins his first match. The CIA sets off a car bomb in Beirut Killing 80, and wounding 200 more, all civilians. Mikhail Gorbachev was sworn in. The first WrestleMania takes place at Madison Square Garden. Coca-Cola releases New Coke. In Mob news, John Gotti. takes over the Gambino crime family, after ordering the hit of bosses Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti. Kansas City Royals won the World Series. Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl, Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA title. And even back then, no one still gave a shit about hockey. But all of these events pale in comparison to the monumental event of 1985.
I am of course, talking about that fateful day, in August of 1985, when the greatest video game, in the history of video games, was released for the Apple II. Than game of course Was Oregon Trail
Our Story starts in 1971 when 3 students from Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. Don Rawitsch who was a Student teacher in history, wanted to find some way to mix in these new fangled computer thingys, to create some sort of lesson plan for history. In stepped Don’s two nerd friends Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, both of whom were students teaching math. They farted around for a while, but in 1974 they finally completed what they had set out to do, and that was the birth of Oregon Trail.
At the time, the MECC was simply a state-funded organization that was designed to create basic learning software for the state’s schools. They used a time-share system, which schools across the state could dial in to for accessing their library of programs. When Don began working at MECC, he decided to upload his home-brew game onto the central network. It was an instant hit. The game was so successful, in fact, that upon the popularization of floppy-based media, the company branched out and sold the game nationwide. The profits from the game were used to fund educational resources for the state of Minnesota.
Educational gaming is almost a lost art in this day and age, I guess the kids are too fucking stupid. When you think back to the era of the 1980s, and even to part of the early 1990s, games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Math Blaster were all the rage in elementary and middle school computer labs everywhere. The thing is, back then, kids were playing these games, that were actually fun, but at the same time actually being taught shit. Learning things like Geography and math, when it didn’t even seem like learning. Most kids at the time were just happy that they were in the computer lab fucking around, not in the class room being taught. But the knowledge was being dropped at the same time. While most of these games faded into obscurity as their audiences outgrew them, one title stands out from the roster of “edu-taining” games of that era as the most addictive, most enduring, and most memorable offering of them all. That game was Oregon Trail.
Part adventure, part strategy, part shootin’ shit and leaving funny tumbstones, Oregon Trail put you in the role of the head of a group of travelers in 1848 who were hoping to make it to the Land of Hippies, via covered wagon, by following the ffamous Oregon Trail. At the beginning, you decided if you wanted to be a banker from Boston, a carpenter from Ohio, or a farmer from Illinois. Then you decided what month of the year you were going to begin your journey and subsequently started stocking up on shit for the trip. You needed to buy oxen to pull your wagon, sets of clothing for your party members, as much food as you could afford, bullets for the purpose of hunting for more food along the trail, and spare wagon parts in case of a breakdown. Every single purchase and choice made at the beginning of the game played into the strategy of what was to come once you hit the Oregon Trail.
Each profession had its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, the banker started off with significantly more money, thus allowing you to purchase more shit for your journey. However, if you chose the carpenter, you’d be able to fix broken wagon parts on your own and wouldn’t need to buy spare parts. In the end, your goal was to reach Oregon with all party members intact–and with as many supplies left as possible because they would tally in to your final score. However, this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Along the trail, you would have to manage your pacing so as not to strain the oxen; you had to manage food rations; you had to hunt animals when food supplies ran low; you had to periodically stop to rest, talk with locals, and attempt to trade with other travelers; and you had to attempt to ford river crossings, either by paying to take a ferry or by attempting to cross it yourself. You’d also have to keep track of your party’s health, as all manner of diseases would rear their ugly heads during the course of your journey, especially that god damn dysentery and typhoid. Even the month of your departure required an element of strategy because leaving too late in the year would force you to have to deal with the cold winter months, thus opening your party even more to disease.
Oregon Trail wasn’t an overly difficult game by any means, but at the same time, it had super addictive quality to it. The game was so simple to figure out from the get-go, yet a nearly endless number of combinations of disasters and bad shit could present themselves as you traversed the trail. In fact, your party’s fortune could reverse and “re-reverse” so many times over such a short span that there was no way to properly predict what could happen. Furthermore, despite the game’s relative simplicity in presentation, there were a number of different things you could actually do besides managing your party. The game’s hunting simulation put you down in a patch of terrain off the trail and let you shoot the shit out of animals as they scurried across the screen. Also, as you went along, you would encounter tombstones for previous players of the game who didn’t make it. If you died yourself, you could write your own epitaph on a tombstone so that future players of the game could eventually stumble upon it. Imagine being in 4th grade in 1989 and seeing all the weird random shit people had left. On top of all of this, the game also managed to teach you a thing or two about the frontier era by presenting you with rudimentary concepts about how people in that time lived and by also presenting bits and pieces of information about various landmarks that were found along the trail. Of course, if you asked someone who played the game, they wouldn’t admit to having learned anything from it. Deep down, however, they knows more about Fort Bridger than probably anyone else because of Oregon Trail.
It’s the best god damn game ever made. Period case closed.
And what would one of my long rambling posts be if I was not hooking you up with something. So here is your gift for reading. Below you will find and download for an Apple II emulator, as well as the rom files for Oregon trail.
applewin emulator
otrail rom
To play the game is easy. Unzip the folders. Go to the emulator folder. Click on the Applewin icon. That will open the emulator. When the emulator is open, click on the icon on the left that says MASTER. That will open a windows explorer box. Go to where you have the Oregon Trail file saves, then click on the Otrail_1 file. That will load it into the emulator. Then click on the Apple Icon on the left of the Emulator ( second button down) and that is it. It will load the game, and you’re all set to go.
Enjoy, nerds
