Last Update: 4/11/07
Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail is an educational computer game about American pioneer life that has a long history in North American school districts and homes. The game was inspired by the real-life Oregon Trail and was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the trail. The player takes the role of a party of people, of a selected profession, traveling across the Oregon Trail in a Conestoga wagon. The success of the game has spawned numerous sequels such as The Amazon Trail and The Yukon Trail.
The first version of the game, simply entitled "OREGON" was made in 1971 and was designed for the teletype machines operating on the TIES system at Carleton College. The original coder was Bill Heinemann. One of the original developers, Don Rawitsch, was a history teacher who later began working at the state-funded Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974, where the game would be further developed. Oregon Trail was distributed through the consortium to educational institutions and the code (written in BASIC) was published in Creative Magazine allowing users of Commodore PET and other early home microcomputers to input it into their own machines to play.
The first version of the game, simply entitled "OREGON" was made in 1971 and was designed for the teletype machines operating on the TIES system at Carleton College. The original coder was Bill Heinemann. One of the original developers, Don Rawitsch, was a history teacher who later began working at the state-funded Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974, where the game would be further developed. Oregon Trail was distributed through the consortium to educational institutions and the code (written in BASIC) was published in Creative Magazine allowing users of Commodore PET and other early home microcomputers to input it into their own machines to play.
Publisher: None/Unknown






