In this Bargain Bin Breakdown, I’m hitting up the school room classic, Oregon Trail.  We all remember playing this little learning game in grade school.  That is, if the school in question was able to finance a room of Apple II’s.  But that’s neither here nor now.

Getting to the technical stuff for the game, I’m just going to give you the wikipedia version:

The original version of The Oregon Trail(K+T) was created in 1971 by three student teachers at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, using a mainframe computer. One of these students, senior Don Rawitsch, had the idea to create a computer program for a history class he was teaching, and recruited two of his friends, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, both of whom were students teaching math, to help him. 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 uploaded his game into the organization’s network where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota, and it proved so popular that it was released and sold on floppy disk in 1985, when the format became popular. Several updated versions were released between 1991 and 2001.

The Oregon Trail, which as I have said many of us might have played back in grade school in the late 80′s and early 90′s, is an educational game.  It takes you back to the 19th century and the time of exploration.  You create your party, or family, and set forth for the green field of the west coast.  Along the way you must cross rivers, hunt for food, and hope that your family stays healthy.

Along your travels you can get help from Indians, trade with other imigrants, and stop by forts and buy more supplies.  I opted to skip most of that, and just head on at a grudgeling pace.  My first meet with the wildes of nature was a river crossing.  I opted to forge on threw, and in retrospec, bad desicion.  As three of my party died.  Not 6 days into my journey.

Carrying on, just the two of us left, we opt to move as fast as we can, rarely stopping to eat or rest.  Although we did stop for some good ‘ol hunt’in!  I remember staying after school in eighth grade so I could play Oregon Trail and hunt, hunt, hunt.  It’s not as good as I remerber it, although it is fun, as the whole game is, it’s a tad lacking.  Bison, are the slowest animals you come across, and offer far more meat than you can carry.  It’s too easy to kill them and then just stand there and wait till the hunting timer is up.  But again, it’s a education game, so action wasn’t a forfront.

I did eventually make it to Oregon, and the end of the game.  But by that point I was all on my lownsome.  Having seen three family members die just days after leaving home.  And then seeing my last compainion pass just days before I reached my destination.  At the end of the game it rewards you with a score based on the amount of supplies you have left, amount of money you have left, and the number and health of the surviving members.  You score can also be doubled or trippled based on who you choose to play as, Banker/Carpenter(doubled)/Farmer(trippled).

I think it took me somewhere around 20-30 minutes to play the whole thing completely through.  There is some replay ability, to see if you can make it all the way with a higher score and make the leaders board.  There is also a lot of learning involved, I even learned a few things I didn’t know, or had forgotten.

I played on an Apple II emulator, which worked very well, once I had found a working download.  But also I found a webbased version of it.  Which is located here.  If you’d like to try it out do a google search for Oregon Trail game download and AppleWin emulator.  Then you can try out some other classics like Amazon Trail.

In the end after almost 40 years I think the game still hold it own, a bit.  It teaches you things, without boring you.  It’s fun, and a little exciting.  But mostly, it’s just what it claims to be, an educational game.

Oregon Trail recieves a score of 5.