The Oregon Trail (series)

The Oregon Trail is a series of strategy computer games. The first game was originally developed by Carleton College students Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach eighth grade schoolchildren about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.

History

Precedent version

In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an eighth grade history class as a student teacher. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help with his student-teaching project. Bill Heinemann used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on an HP 2100 minicomputer to write the original computer program.

The original core gameplay concepts that have been included in every subsequent version are initial supply purchase, occasional food hunting, occasional supply purchase at forts, inventory management of supplies, variable travel speed depending upon conditions, frequent misfortunes, and game over upon death or successfully reaching Oregon. The game that would be later named The Oregon Trail was debuted to Rawitsch's class on December 3, 1971. Although the minicomputer's teleprinter and paper tape terminals that predate display screens were awkward to children, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to users of the minicomputer time-sharing network owned by Minneapolis Public Schools.