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The Oregon Trail is an educational strategy video game developed and published by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). It was first released in 1985 for the Apple II, with later ports to DOS in 1990, Mac OS in 1991, and Microsoft Windows in 1993. It was created as a re-imagining of the popular text-based game of the same name, originally created in 1971 and published by MECC in 1975. In the game, 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 on the Oregon Trail in 1848. Along the trail, the player makes choices about supplies, resource management, and the route, and deals with hunting for food, crossing rivers, and random events such as storms and disease.
The game was designed and created by a team at MECC led by game designer R. Philip Bouchard over a ten-month period from 1984 to 1985. It was intended as a core part of MECC's shift from games and software on mainframe computers accessed by remote terminals to those on home computers, as well as MECC's first game intended primarily for home consumers rather than for schools. It is the first graphical and the most well known entry in the Oregon Trail series, and was MECC's flagship product from release until the company was bought by SoftKey in 1995. Games in the series have since been released in many editions by various developers and publishers, many titled The Oregon Trail. The multiple games in the series are often considered to be iterations on the same title, and they have collectively sold over 65 million copies and have been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
The Oregon Trail is an educational strategy video game in which the player, as the leader of a wagon train, controls a group journeying down the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri, to Willamette Valley, Oregon, in 1848. The player controls the game via a keyboard, primarily by selecting one of several numbered options. They begin the game by selecting their character's profession—banker, carpenter, or farmer—which corresponds with difficulty levels and give different amounts of money with which to start the journey. They then name their character and their four party members, and purchase supplies for their journey from Matt's General Store: oxen to pull the wagon, food, clothing, ammunition, and spare parts to fix wagon breakdowns. The party then sets off on their journey. The path is divided into sixteen segments, each ending at a landmark such as a river crossing or a fort. Each landmark has different choices available to the player, such as purchasing supplies at a fort, talking to fellow travelers at a geographic landmark, or choosing how to cross a river.[1] Rivers can be crossed by fording the river, caulking the wagon and floating across, or in some cases by paying for a ferry; the chance of crossing without failure, which can result in losing supplies or damaging the wagon, depends on the state of the river and the weather.[2] As the party progresses further along the trail, the prices for supplies rise. At two landmarks, the player can choose to take a "cut-off", or shortcut; these paths are shorter but bypass the next landmark, a fort. For the final segment, the player can choose to either take a toll road cut-off to the end, or raft down the Columbia River by playing a minigame wherein they must dodge rocks in the river.[3]
In between landmarks, the party journeys for days over a hundred miles, as shown to the player by a screen that displays the date, weather, health of the party, how many pounds of food the party has remaining, and the distances to the next landmark and from the previous. An animated oxen and wagon is shown, with a representation of the next landmark sliding towards it from the left as the party travels and a landscape of the terrain for that segment in the background. Random events can occur during the traveling phase, such as a storm causing a delay or a party member falling ill.[4] The player can also stop the journey at any point, and can then check the status of their supplies, look at the map of their journey, change the pace of travel, change the amount of food rationed for the party per day, stop to rest, trade with other parties for supplies, or hunt for food. Changing the pace of travel affects how long each segment takes and also the likelihood of different events, such as oxen going lame, and changing the food rations similarly affects how quickly food supplies are used and the likelihood of events.
