It seems everyone I ask that went to primary/elementary school in the mid to late 80s or early 90s played this game, often on a lonely computer carted from classroom to classroom. How did this game find its way into schools all over America? Was it specifically designed as an educational tool?
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, one of the biggest tech clusters in the country was Minnesota. It was home to a group of large computing companies like Honeywell, UNIVAC, and IBM Rochester, with 14,000 workers all put together across 21 plants.
Related to this, there was a large push to connect all high schools to computers; 1965 had a single high school, UHigh (University High School) connected to a mainframe via teletype, and this eventually expanded in 1967 with TIES, or Total Information for Educational System, involving eighteen Minnesota school districts. These connections were made with teletype: not using a monitor, but printers that would dial into a central server hosted at a university. (This was doing "time-sharing"; even though the computers were technically "slow", they were still much faster than a single person and had large chunks of downtime waiting for user input, so multiple users were able to be accomodated at the same time.)
It was in this environment, in the December of 1971, where the first version of Oregon Trail (or initially, OREGON) was devised.
Don Rawitsch was a student teacher with an 8th grade class in US history, and during a western expansion unit tried his hand at designing a board game for the class. At the time he was roommates with Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, both who had taken computer classes at Carleton, and suggested that the board game might be better as a computer game instead.
At the time, there was something of a disjoint in computational educational circles between those who were interested in computers as a method for doing raw drills, only with the computer more carefully choosing problems (Computer-Assisted Instruction, or CAI) versus those who were interested in computers as simulators; i.e. The Sumerian Game from 1964 (designed by the school teacher Mabel Addis) where the player is tasked as king of the Babylonian people and must allocate crops and contend with plagues.
The trio of Rawitsch, Heinemann and Dillenberger's project fell into the latter: simulating a trip on the Oregon Trail, done entirely in text.
DO YOU WANT TO (1) STOP AT THE NEXT FORT, (2) HUNT, OR (3) CONTINUE
Many of the aspects of the game from the original text version are recognizable in the 80s version; having to buy oxen, food, and ammunition; having to go hunting with a mini-game — in the teletype version, you had to type BANG quickly enough when prompted:
WHENEVER YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR TRUSTY RIFLE ALONG THE WAY, YOU WILL SEE THE WORDS: TYPE BANG. THE FASTER YOU TYPE" IN THE WORD 'BANG' AND HIT THE 'RETURN' KEY, THE BETTER" LUCK YOU'LL HAVE WITH YOUR GUN.
There were even technically sound effects, applying an ASCII code to ring the internal bell of the teletype.
(Dysentery, sadly, did not get added until later.)
Native Americans were only mentioned explicitly in a line about "HELPFUL INDIANS SHOW YOU WHERE TO FIND MORE FOOD". When attacked, the player is attacked by "riders", which Rawitsch stated while technically including Indians, was meant to indicate bandits were more likely. (In fact, throughout the versions of the game, fairly close attention was taken to the likelihood of events -- percentages of people who died on the actual trail were intended to match the percentage chance of death in the game. That is, the simulation conveyed the probability of particular events happening in a way that was visceral, which is hard to do with students with a dry notice about x% of people dying from dysentery.)
Arriving successfully results in congratulations:
PRESIDENT JAMES K. POLK SENDS YOU HIS HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS AND WISHES YOU A PROSPEROUS LIFE AHEAD AT YOUR NEW HOME
This project was popular with the class, but it was essentially shelved afterwards; the code was deleted off the server although Rawitsch kept a printout of the sourcecode.
TIES eventually turned into MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) in 1973 and was a huge success; by 1975 they served 84% of the students in public school, and the governor declared October 19-25 in 1975 to be Computer Week. This is long before many districts through the country even had a notion of computer capability.
Don Rawitsch was hired in 1974. While there pulled out his own game and revamped it, although still in text; the earliest version we have is dated March 1975. (The 1971 source code is lost, although we can technically reconstruct it a little from the 1975 version. This is because BASIC uses line numbers, and the traditional "skip" is to go by 10s, so the "irregular number" lines are likely the new additions from 1975.)
OREGON was an enormous success in Minnesota, logging 5000 user sessions over the 77-78 school year. MECC had bough 500 Apple IIs for Minnesota classrooms by 1980, and with that came a new port of Oregon (with some graphics, but not much; video here). This became a flagship product for MECC, who eventually became an educational powerhouse, with a 1985 version (the one that become a huge seller and the one everyone remembers from school). Updates happened in 1990 (when an investment group bought MECC from the state of Minnesota), 1992, 1993, and 1995, by which point Oregon Trail was making about $10 million of MECC's $30 million in revenue.
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Maher, J. (2015). The Digital Antiquarian Volume 1: 1966-1979. (Maher was the one who unearthed the 1975 code, and if you search you can find a version playable over TELNET.)
Misa, T. (2013). Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry. Minnesota University Press.
Rankin, J. (2015). From the mainframes to the masses: a participatory computing movement in Minnesota education. Information & Culture, 50(2), 197-216.
Reed, A. (2022). 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon. (Forthcoming, not yet published.)
See the excellent top post from /u/jbdyer for the core history on this question and great background on MECC. There are a lot of tech-related articles on the history of the game as well, due in part I'm sure to Gen X nostalgia for their early computer gaming experiences. These include:
And of course one can play the 1990 version at the Internet Archive any time.
I have a faculty colleague who worked for MECC in the 1980s who shared some stories from that era as well. Since I teach the history of the American West and played the game myself as as student in 1981-1982 (on the TRS 80 platform) I'd long been curious about the origins of the game and its apparent ubiquity. Over the last 20+ years of teaching Western history I've yet to encounter a class where 75% or more did not report familiarity with the game, including as recently as spring 2022.
I think one of the reasons the game because so popular was that it aligned with curriculum standards in history for many districts across the US in the 1980s/1990s, where teaching about Western expansion focused on familiar narratives of exploration and adventure without any hint of critique of settler colonialism nor much presence of indigenous people. The game was inoffensive to its market-- uncontroversial --and appealed to teachers who could use it as a reward or to turn an otherwise "boring" unit into something more hands-on. That was especially true in the 1980s when video games were a cultural phenomenon and yet most families did not have computers or even game consoles at home.
I would also argue that Oregon Trail-- and public school computing in general --got a boost from the furor over the publication of A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) which found American school children falling behind those of other industrialized nations in basic skills. It sparked additional educational reforms, particularly around curricula, that in many districts included a new or expanded emphasis on computers/computing. While it was challenging to quickly introduce computer labs, programming classes, and entirely new areas of instruction finding educational applications for the handful of computers already in most schools was far easier-- just wheel the cart into history class and have the kids play Oregon trail. Now they are prepared for the future!
Finally, there's a concurrent mid-1980s debate among historians and history educators at all levels about how to best teach American history. That debate broke down, in the most simple sense, to one between content coverage and skills: should students be memorizing names/dates/geography or learning the skills of historical reasoning and analysis? [note: we obviously still haven't settled this question] A decade or more of experimentation with what some called "the new history" (like the "new math" that followed) were not particularly well received by parents or school boards; teaching history as a process was slow and it naturally meant that some topics didn't get covered. By the early 1980s there were calls to return to "coverage" in the form of traditional surveys, while others argued for different approaches including what we would call "active learning pedagogies" today. Writing in The History Teacher in 1986 historians Linda Rosenzweig and Thomas Weinland concluded that
We have lurched from "old" history to "new" history and back again. We have been criticized for teaching too much content and too little content. And most seriously, we have been attacked as irrelevant. (The History Teacher , Feb., 1986, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Feb., 1986), pp. 263-277)
The introduction of computer-based history lessons and simulations, first and most successfully done by MECC with Oregon Trail, offered secondary school teachers a way to teach content-- often state or district mandated content --with the exciting new technology that also made history relevant in the wake of A Nation at Risk. It didn't hurt that kids were delighted as well. In the late 1980s these debates took on more urgency with the publication of Charting a Course: Social Studies for the 21st Century. A Report of the Curriculum Task Force of the National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools (1989) which expressly recommended the use of role playing, simulations, and other active learning pedagogies in teaching history-- which classroom teachers could certainly take as an endorsement of their continued reliance on Oregon Trail in teaching the broadly-required unit on the American West in 8th grade US history classes.