So for fun I sometimes sit around and tweak the list of games I’d like to include in this feature. Games get moved up and down all the time, but the overarching principle I use is this: What games should a person experience before they die? And more presently for myself, which games would I want to write about before I die?
It’s morbid, but then, so are many games.
Which leads us to one of the most brutal lessons many people of a certain age ever experienced via the educational game The Oregon Trail: that life is constantly trying to kill you.
It’s not what I’d call a subtle lesson either.
It cracks me up to this day that educators saw fit to knock this lesson into kids’ heads for something like a generation of kids (maybe more?).
“Hey kids? Want to learn about the world? Well here’s this ‘history game’ [wink, wink] that’ll show you how much life sucks sucked. Have a good time getting adjusted!”
The thing is, this game was wildly addictive anyway.
Yeah, it was borderline impossible to avoid snakebites and/or cholera. But the point of the thing was to try to win anyway, and when someone in the class was finally able to confirm that, yes, it was possible to make it all the way to the end without sustaining complete disaster, well that was just the perfect brew of crack cocaine the rest of us needed to continue to come back to it.
Plus it was a video game. In class. As opposed to math worksheets or some other mundane task like collecting rocks.
OF COURSE everyone loved this game.
The Oregon Trail
Genre: Educational
Released: 1985
Platform: Apple
No. 9 on Time’s 50 Best Video Games of All Time