50 years ago today, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger created the Oregon Trail game on the HP 2100 minicomputer. It was first released to the public in 1975 for timesharing on the CDC Cyber 700. It wasn’t widely available to the public until it was released for the Apple II in 1978.
For many people, playing Oregon Trail was their first experience at using a computer. The game was published by MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium). They published a number of games, but Oregon Trail is the best known. I remember playing Lemonade Stand and Odell Lake, but they aren’t so well remembered.
Being distributed in schools meant that a great many people were familiar with the game, and was a shared cultural experience for millions. You can play the game for yourself at VisitOregon.org The Oregon Trail Game The web page has a link to Archive.org, there they have the 1990 PC version. That’s a little fancy for me. I like the 1978 version with it’s crude Apple II graphics.
Here’s a Smithsonian article about the game. SmithsonianMag.org How You Wound Up Playing ‘The Oregon Trail’ in Computer Class
Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, three student teachers enrolled at nearby Carleton College, created The Oregon Trail in November 1971 for an eighth-grade history class Rawitsch was teaching. The game starts in Missouri, 1848, where the player equips a party of pioneers for the 2,000-mile journey to Willamette Valley, Oregon. Along the way the player manages his or her wagon train through river crossings, food shortages, injuries, illnesses, breakdowns and theft. As soon as Rawitsch uploaded it to the UNIVAC mainframe it became a hit. Then he deleted it. His class finished in December. “We had to remove the game from the Minneapolis Schools computer,” says Rawitsch, “and we had no other computer to run it on. We printed on paper the entire listing of the programming code for the game.” The Oregon Trail was only a month old.
When MECC hired Rawitsch in 1974, the game had been a dormant pile of papers for three years. MECC set him to work resurrecting the game, and as he did, he added new features. He read diaries of Oregon Trail pioneers for ideas on new events to include, such as pegging the likelihood of certain events to certain locations. “For example, the South Pass through the Rockies occurs at 950 miles along the trail,” he says. “Only if (you were at least 950 miles along) would certain mountain-related events like 'snow' or 'oxen injury in rough terrain' occur.” Accounts of help from American Indians popped up often in those diaries, so he introduced events into the game where players would encounter friendly tribes. “I sharpened up the historical accuracy of the game without changing its design.” The revised The Oregon Trail landed on Minnesota's UNIVAC system in 1975, right about the time companies were preparing the earliest (relatively) small and affordable personal computers.