The Oregon Trail Pc Game Views

General Goods

The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by MECC in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding his party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley over the Oregon Trail via a Conestoga wagon in 1848. The game has been released in many editions since the original release by various developers and publishers who have acquired rights to the game.

The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on 3 December 1971. Despite bugs, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to others on Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service. When the next semester ended, however, Rawitsch deleted the program, although he printed out a copy of the source code.[3]

In 1974 Rawitsch took a job at Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC, a state-funded organization that developed educational software for the classroom. He added many historically accurate features and uploaded The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota. The game became one of the network's most popular programs, with thousands of players monthly.[3]

In 1978 MECC began encouraging its schools to adopt the Apple II microcomputer.[3] The first published version of The Oregon Trail was in Creative Computing's May-June 1978 issue. It was written in BASIC 3.1 for the CDC Cyber 70/73-26. The program was then adapted by John Cook for the Apple II, and provided on A.P.P.L.E.'s PDS Disk series #108. A further version called Oregon Trail 2 was adapted in June, 1978 by J.P. O'Malley. The game was further released as part of MECC's Elementary series, on Elementary Volume 6 in 1980. The game was titled simply Oregon, and featured minimal graphics. It proved so popular that it was re-released as a standalone game, with substantially improved graphics, in 1985. By 1995 The Oregon Trail comprised about one third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue.[4]