The classic computer game from the Doom Generation’s childhood
Back in the lawless days of pioneers, wild buffalo, and the Apple II known as the 1980s, you could play a game with the first two things on the last. Usually at school of all places. The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) used to publish games in this era that combined teaching subjects like math and history with surprisingly decent gameplay. One of their most famous releases was this game, The Oregon Trail.
The game chronicles the pioneer life on the eponymous Oregon Trail as the player takes his family west from Independence, Missouri out to the west coast of the United States. Though there is some variance in the gameplay, The Oregon Trail is at heart an adventure game that starts you off with a wife and some kids and allows you to pick an occupation and buy some supplies. Each occupation gives you different advantages. The banker, for instance, starts with the most money.
Micromanagement comes into play as you set your family’s daily pace down the trail and the portion size in your food rationing. You’ll also ration your money for when you arrive at pioneer towns and forts and have the opportunity to stock back up on goods. The player will often have to stop and deal with 19th century problems such as having to hunt for food, wagon fires, injured oxen, or family members coming down with diseases long since eradicated in the free world. If someone in your family (including you!) dies you can write an epitaph on their tombstone, though the age group generally playing this game in its heyday tended not to pen the most…respectful of messages. Interestingly, if you replay the game on the same computer you have a chance to run into and read tombstones from someone’s previous playthrough.
When food rations run low you can choose to go hunting. This throws you into a top-down view where you’ll shoot your pixel dot bullets at rabbits, deer, buffalo, and the like to get some meat for the family. You can shoot as many animals as you want, but can only about 100 pounds or so can be carried back to a wagon at the time. Is this an example of early social commentary in games about the reported wastefulness of western American settlers? That will be for you as a player to decide.
At the end of the trail you will encounter the game’s final action section where you can go down a ground path or float down a river to get to the goal. Either way you’ll find your wagon in a fixed position and navigate to the left or right with the arrow keys to dodge hazards in your path. This section is fairly fun and it’s a shame the MECC didn’t use it in a few other parts of the game besides the end.
In the final analysis this game will mostly appeal to nostalgia for people who were kids in the time frame of the early 1980s to mid 1990s. How cool was it to play video games at school after all? The game does have merits on its own of immersing the player in the history of the pioneer times and still being fun to play, but it could be hard to interest children as time moves on as it is hard to gauge their response to its classic low bit graphics and simple color palette and sound.