It’s been a while since I did the first entry in this series, but I’m back, and its time to continue my search for the point where The Oregon Trail games jumped the sharks. Today, I’m going to play the first ‘real’ Oregon Trail game, the 1985 edition. After the widespread success of the teletype edition of the game, in addition to the simple standalone version I played last time, MECC released a standalone, graphically superior version of the original OREGON software. This version of the game was initially released for the Apple II, and as a result of the widespread use of that computer in classrooms, The Oregon Trail immediately became an educational hit among teachers and students. Over the coming years, The Oregon Trail would not only make massive amounts of money for MECC (the company responsible for its creation), but would also find it’s way into the cultural consciousness of an entire generation of schoolchildren, teachers, and parents. When someone thinks Oregon Trail, this is the version of the game that most people think of. The same rules I used last time still apply here: I can’t restart, and if I lose, I lose the game, no trying again. Again, I am running this inside a Apple II emulator called ApplePC which I’m running inside a DOS emulator, simply because this was the setup that made video capture the easiest.

While I’m happy that I made it to the end of the trail this time, I did play as a banker, which is probably the easiest way to do it. In retrospect, I probably could have afforded to rest just a little bit more than I did, and maybe have averted the deaths that I had, but that's the way it goes. Also, as a side note, I decided to look up the "peperony and chease" gravestone, and apparently, the story behind is that some kid named Andy was rather amused by the Tombstone pizza commercials that asked "What do you want on your tombstone?", which the answer to was a badly spelled "Pepperoni and Cheese". Next time, I’ll be playing the first version of The Oregon Trail that I ever personally played, Oregon Trail Deluxe for DOS.