The Oregon Trail (1988)

Wagon trains heading west

Until 1846 the Oregon Country was a claim contested between Britain and America. The Oregon Treaty settled it, and the land became United States territory. It was sparsely settled, fertile, rich in fur, and rumoured to hide deposits of precious metals. From the late 1840s onward a long stream of covered wagons rolled out of the civilised East after a better life. A handful of those families actually found one. Tens of thousands died on the way.

The 1988 MS-DOS port puts you in charge of one of those wagon parties. Your objective is the one the real pioneers had: get as many of your people to the Willamette Valley as you can, alive and in something close to one piece.

Outfit, and then decide

Before the wagon rolls you stand at Matt's General Store and decide what to bring: oxen, food, ammunition, clothing, spare parts. The bankroll is small and the trail is long. The right outfit is not the most expensive one. It is the one balanced for the months ahead.

On the road the decisions multiply. When and where to stop. Which member of the party gets a full ration and which gets half. Whether to ford the next river, ferry it, or float across. Which animals to hunt, and how long to wait out a poor camp. No single one of these is a big decision. Added together, they are the journey.

The actual Oregon Trail, 1841 to 1869

Between 1841 and 1869 about 400,000 American settlers travelled the historical Oregon Trail, a 2,170-mile wagon route from Independence, Missouri to Oregon's Willamette Valley. Departures clustered in April or May. The journey took four to six months on average, and the goal was to reach Oregon City before the Blue Mountains snowed in by November. Roughly 20,000 to 30,000 of those settlers died on the way. The great majority died of disease, cholera above all, though dysentery, typhoid, and measles took their share. Drowning at river crossings, accidents with wagons or rifles, and plain exhaustion accounted for most of the rest.

Three different streams of people shared the trail's opening miles. Families heading for Oregon farmland were the largest group from the early 1840s onward, and the so-called 'Great Migration' of around 1,000 emigrants in 1843 is usually taken as the moment the route became a regular wagon road. From 1847 the same path carried Brigham Young and the first Mormon pioneer companies toward Salt Lake City. From 1849 the California Gold Rush pulled prospectors south at a fork roughly halfway to Oregon. When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 the wagon era was effectively over, and the trail became history almost overnight.

From a Minnesota classroom to MS-DOS

The Oregon Trail did not begin life as a commercial product. In December 1971 three student teachers, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger, wrote it as a text-based BASIC program for an eighth-grade history class at Bryant Junior High in Minneapolis. The first version ran on a teletype wired to an HP 2100 minicomputer. Students typed commands and the computer printed back paragraphs of trail-life narrative on continuous-feed paper. The code itself was hand-written on yellow notepaper before anyone keyed it in.

The program would have disappeared after the school year ended if Rawitsch had not joined the newly-founded Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. On his way out of his teaching job he uploaded the source onto MECC's mainframe. It was a small administrative act, and it turned a two-week classroom assignment into the most widely-played educational game of the next thirty years. By 1975 it ran on Minnesota's state-wide school timeshare network. By 1985 R. Philip Bouchard had reimagined it as a graphical adventure for the Apple II. And in 1988 that graphical version arrived on MS-DOS, the release preserved here.

A micromanager's classic

Graphically the 1988 release is the leanest Trail in MECC's catalogue. It uses the same line art, the same chunky 16-colour palette, and the same bare interface that ran on the 1985 Apple II. What it has going for it is history. This is the version that brought the modern Trail design to the PC, and gave a generation of school computer-lab kids their first taste of resource-management gameplay.

It is plainly an artefact of an earlier era. But if you like micromanagement, or you are curious about where the franchise actually started on IBM hardware, it is still worth an hour.

Notable systems

• First Oregon Trail to run on MS-DOS
• 16-colour CGA / EGA graphics inherited from the 1985 Apple II
• Five professions, hunting, river crossings, full Independence-to-Oregon route
• The same gameplay loop that defined the franchise for forty years