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The Story of The Oregon Trail

33 Less than a minute
The Story of The Oregon Trail

The Story of The Oregon Trail

#Story #Oregon #Trail

“Gaming Historian”

In 1971, three student teachers in Minneapolis, MN created a little computer game about westward expansion in the United States. Over 50 years later, The Oregon Trail series has sold more than 65 million copies and has been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. But the original…

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33 Less than a minute

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33 Comments

  2. My parents own a nursery school, and they keep an Apple Performa 580 in the classroom for five year olds, specifically to play Oregon Trail. Most of them like hunting, but every year there's at least one student (again, five years old) who actually plans their journey and beats the game, to the amazement of their peers. It's a wonderful game.

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  5. I have only the utmost respect for these men. As a kid in the 90s, we played the 1985 version of the game in our dinky little computer lab that once was a storage closet at my school. Naturally, my classmates and I adored it. And nowadays, I'm a Social Studies teacher who teaches 18th and 19th Century U.S. History, and I get to share the '85 game with my students each year. And most are still just as charmed by the game as I was, and it has always been a hit as a part of that unit's lessons. And, of course, I face constant requests to play it again the rest of the school year… and honestly, we do usually return to it since it's a great way to spend the last day or so of school as things are winding down and everyone's burnt out, haha. A fantastic documentary, can't wait to share it with the other teachers in our history department.

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  7. This unlocked a core memory I didn't even know I had.

    When I was in elementary school (starting K back in 1985), I remember seeing the computer lab at my first school only a couple of times (kindergarten was only half day, and there was some sort of restriction in place for 1st graders, so I didn't actually play Oregon Trail until 87), but one of the times, I saw it, I remember there was what was apparently a promotional poster for the then new 85 version of the game with that dude in the bucket hat and beard hanging on one of the walls. It was pretty much just that game cover, but extended down slightly with a couple screenshots – I think of the main travel screen with the oxen, and a shot of the hunting minigame – and a blurb that five or six year old me wasn't quite equipped to or even desired to read. But something struck me about that picture at the time. I wondered what it was and if I could play it on my Atari.

    Didn't even associate the image with the game ever again as all the lab discs were in card boxes in sleeves with no sort of cover art. And there were only so many of the "desired" games, so it became a mad rush to get a copy of OT, Word/Number Munchers, and a couple of other games that are now lost to time until Carmen Sandiego got really, really huge… though sadly I remember there was some Spider-Man game that we chalked up to being some sort of red herring because it was obtuse, had no way of knowing how it worked without any documentation, and contained very little actual Spider-Man in involvement… so, a complete waste of that week's 45 minute lab time spent not playing something fun like Oregon Trail.

    But it was right now, today, an hour into this video that made me think of a fleeting moment of looking at a thing on a wall almost four decades ago. The human brain sure is weird, huh?

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  10. This is what you can say the US's very own original RPG game, well kind off. But if you look what an RPG elements are, are also or most are in the game like health or resource usage. The quality of the documentary is like what you see in most high paid networks. Nice work. Well reaserched and organized. All people involved are recognized in this episode. The long wait for this is worth it. Thanks for your hard work Gaming Historian. Maybe someday your own history will be documented too. 😎

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  13. This has to be your magnum opus, to date. It's a literal masterpiece. The production value, the music, the interviews, editing, illustrations, script… And definitely, the most touching and emotional so far.
    Worth the wait.

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  14. This was a terrific video! I spent so many hours playing the Apple II version of Oregon Trail in grade school, and it was really special to hear about the people behind it. Got me right in the feels. And I can honestly say that Oregon Trail was a major player for me growing up in terms of sparking an interest in both learning and gaming. Big thanks to everyone involved in the Oregon Trail and to the makers of this video.

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  15. This is probably one of the best episodes you have ever made. I’m super game 😋 for these longer form episodes! Keep them coming.. make one on Chrono Trigger

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  17. I suspect the reason the game became so popular was the method of distribution. If these 3 gentlemen incorporated a company to make some shekels, the chances of the game becoming so popular would have been limited, and we never would have known their names. They were teachers, not business men.

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  20. It's so crazy to me that I lived in Oregon my whole life, and went public school in mid 90s-2000s, in the Portland area, yet somehow I have never played the Oregon Trail game. I had never even heard of it until after I graduated.

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  21. 10:00 As a college student learning the statistical programming language R, I completely understand the enthrallment of learning programming. I eagerly await each new assignment from my professor and I love to spend hours searching for and trying new bits of code to accomplish what I want.

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  23. Thanks so much and what a blast from the past. Who doesn't remember Oregon Trail and is literally the first memory I have of sitting at a computer at school when I was about 9. Keep up the good work your videos are amazing and I've been watching you ever since you would videotape these things in your bedroom with the NES 2 top loader and Donkey Kong history but my favorite video from you is Super Mario Bros 3. Keep up the good work

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  28. It's interesting to look at this story in 2024 when we (settlers) are beginning to have a greater understanding and respect for Indigenous histories and sovereignty.

    Like, through a contemporary lens, the bit at 25:18 where they 'fix' the problem of negative portrayal of Indigenous folks by simply erasing them from the land – inadvertently repeating the 'teraa nullius' lie that the West was just empty and waiting for white people to arrive – is wild. It helps to illustrate how careful even well-intentioned teachers have to be when dealing with complex histories – we're just as liable to fall back into the kind of shitty tropes that propagandists like Bierstadt were leveraging intentionally to advance the settler-colonial project.

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