Oregon Trail II

What is Oregon Trail II?

Oregon Trail II is the 1995 ground-up sequel to MECC's classic. It keeps the same instinct for resource-management storytelling and builds a much bigger world around it. Where the 1990 game gave you one trail, one starting city, and one departure date, II opens a network: five jumping-off points, three rival routes (Oregon, California, Mormon), a branch decision every couple of weeks, and a launch year you pick anywhere between 1840 and 1860.

Production was led by Wayne Studer and the design carried R. Philip Bouchard's fingerprints from the earlier games. The art jumped to full-motion scrolling travel rather than the static landmark stills of 1990, character portraits became full-colour digitised photographs, and the cast expanded to include named historical figures with primary-source-flavoured dialogue.

Development

Oregon Trail II was a real jump in scope. The events got more detailed (dysentery, measles, cholera, typhoid, hypothermia, dozens of accidents), the inventory and economy grew, and the other wagon trains you meet on the trail became something you actually interact with. Every encounter puts a choice in front of you that can shift the run.

Gameplay

From the opening screen you have real freedom. Pick your name, occupation, departure date, jumping-off city, destination, and the type of wagon you'll use. Then build your party, naming and ageing each travelling companion. You also get skill points to spend on traits like carpentry, blacksmithing, medicine, and river-piloting, and those traits change which random events tip your way and which knock you sideways.

Trail life is much more granular than 1990. The Columbia River raft is a longer, harder mini-sequence. Accidents and illnesses pull up a choice menu instead of just a one-line update. Pace, ration, and rest decisions interact in ways that reward planning weeks ahead. And you can stop and trade with passing parties for the supplies you missed in town.

Outfitting matters more than ever. Gear has weight, and if you pass the wagon's limit you'll be leaving goods on the trailside. The store offers package deals for a six-month outfit, though the long trail will eat or trade most of it. You can take the computer's pre-built loadout or assemble your own across the towns you visit. Some items only turn up in packages, or in a mid-route trade.

An entire general store

Oregon Trail II's biggest single departure from the original is the shop. The first game offered seven supply categories. The 1995 sequel offers several dozen, sometimes hundreds. Instead of a single 'food' bar you stock specific items: ham, canned maple syrup, sacks of flour, onions and potatoes, jars of liquorice, honey, and lard, jerky, cheese, garlic strings, coffee beans, packages of biscuits and crackers, and dozens more besides.

Beyond food there is a full general-goods catalogue: hats and pairs of boots, checker and card sets, horses and chickens, coffee pots and grinders, nails and hammers, guitars and banjos, alongside the more familiar ammunition, oxen, and wagon parts. And a small period pharmacy: tinctures of anise, vinegar, castor oil, dozens of mid-19th-century remedies whose effectiveness is exactly as mixed as it was in 1849.

If micromanagement is not your idea of fun, take the storekeeper's bulk-outfit offer on the first visit, three to six months of supplies in one click, and you only need to pick the oxen yourself. The wagon itself is chosen back on the new-game screen, in three load capacities (3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 lbs). Version 1.3 even adds a quick-start option from the main menu, with a random profession, route, and outfit. On the way out of town you can also join a wagon train of any size. Travelling the Wild West alone is genuinely dangerous in this game.

Two hundred faces, and a Spanish skill

The cast also expands. Roughly two hundred FMV-acted characters and around 250 landmarks, against the original's eighteen, appear across the routes, built from something like five thousand period photographs gathered during development. Several dozen towns and forts can be visited in first-person panoramic views, with costumed extras milling around in random combinations and arrows leading into smithies, pharmacies, stables, even a newspaper office where you can read dated headlines from, say, April 1844.

The dialogue is voiced, modestly, and subtitled. Most NPCs tell you their short life story the first time you ask. You can press for advice, ask them to repeat ('Pardon?'), say goodbye, or, in most cases, propose a trade. The faces repeat, since most parts are played by a small cast of MECC employees, the company president among them as 'Father of Oregon' John McLoughlin. The individual stories don't repeat, though.

And one of the smartest details: in some areas the locals only speak Spanish. Without the optional Spanish skill spent at character creation, you can't understand them. Twelve or so optional skill points spent thoughtfully at the start (carpentry, blacksmithing, medicine, river-pilot, languages) genuinely change which conversations open up to you and which random events you survive.

A real 1849 guidebook

The Guidebook button opens a 149-page reference based on a real 1849 emigrant's guide. Its travel advice and landmark descriptions are even tuned to the year you start. Choose 1842 and the prose is noticeably more cautious about which forts are reliable. Choose 1859 and the tone is more matter-of-fact. The book isn't tailored to your particular route, so you will skip past pages that don't apply, but it's an unusual primary-source touch for an edutainment title of this era.

An alphabetical Glossary sits in the top menu too, handy when an unfamiliar disease shows up in the diary and you need to work out whether it's serious. Self-treatment with camphor or lecithin from the wagon's pharmacy then proceeds at your own risk.

Real names from the trail

Many of the named figures Oregon Trail II puts on screen are not invented. Mountain man Jim Bridger really did run a fur-trapping post, Fort Bridger, in present-day Wyoming, and it became one of the most important resupply stops on the route west. The game places him there correctly. John McLoughlin is real too. He was the chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver, often called the 'Father of Oregon' for the supplies and credit he extended to incoming American settlers, and in the game he is voiced by MECC's company president.

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were Presbyterian missionaries who established the Whitman Mission in the Oregon Country in 1836. They were killed there in November 1847 by Cayuse warriors, in what became known as the Whitman Massacre, an event that helped spark the Cayuse War. The mission ruins still stand today as a National Historic Site outside Walla Walla, Washington. Brigham Young led the first Mormon pioneer company along what became the Mormon Trail in 1847 and founded Salt Lake City, the same fork the game's Mormon Trail destination represents.

The shadow of the Donner Party (1846 to 1847) hangs over the California Trail option as well. Eighty-seven settlers tried the new Hastings Cutoff to Sacramento, were trapped by early snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada, and only forty-eight survived, many of them through cannibalism. The game doesn't name them directly, but the disastrous-shortcut option that punishes underprepared late-season California-bound parties teaches the same lesson their story left to history: take the proven route, leave on time, and don't believe a stranger's promises about a faster way.

The Columbia River raft

The original game ended with a Columbia River raft section. Oregon Trail II turns it into a full minigame. You steer by hand with the mouse, dodging rocks and whirlpools through a narrow water canyon for several long minutes. It is unforgiving by any standard, and the lead designer was open about that: only one person on the dev team ever finished the optional version of the route, and only after two months of practice.

The Dalles still offers the older overland alternative, the Barlow Road, but if you arrive before 1848 or short on money, the raft is the only way through. It's a small, almost confessional sign of how seriously this game takes its source material. The journey it represents is accurate enough that, if you pay attention, it ends up being almost too true to life.

II, or the original?

Oregon Trail II is the most mechanically ambitious entry in the family. It deepens nearly everything the 1990 game did, the choices, the detail, the history, and it earns the word sequel. It is also a more demanding game. New players sometimes bounce off the sheer volume of decisions before they find the rhythm of the trail.

Whether II beats the original is a long-running argument. II is the better simulation. 1990 is the tighter design. Both are worth playing, and for branching, historical-figure-rich Trail design, II is still the high-water mark.

Notable systems

• Three trail forks (Oregon · California · Mormon)
• Five starting cities, multiple departure dates
• Full-motion scrolling travel screen
• Historical-figure encounters
• Detailed economy, illness model, and rest mechanic