The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail is a text-based strategy video game developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) beginning in 1975. It was developed as a computer game to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. In the game, the player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon via a covered wagon in 1847. Along the way the player must purchase supplies, hunt for food, and make choices on how to proceed along the trail while encountering random events such as storms and wagon breakdowns. The original versions of the game contain no graphics, as they were developed for computers that used teleprinters instead of computer monitors. A later Apple II port added a graphical shooting minigame.

Becoro # 2023-04-06 21:44:10 - source

display: text

This is the original original version of The Oregon Trail that ran on mainframes connected through phone calls. Manual input; keyboard or binary toggle switches. Keyboard is much perfected since word-input commands are more effective when typed in faster. This is not a quirk, it is a game mechanic. For example, to pull the trigger on a target when hunting, the player must type BANG. The faster this word is entered, the more accurate the shot will be. Later versions could be played through a terminal, but the original original original would make a paper printout of the game's output.

zerothis # 2021-08-02 00:08:01

was remade as
Oregon (Sol-20)
Oregon (Apple II E)