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
Anyway, if you’re somehow unfamiliar with this game — meaning you’re hilariously young/old or have been living in some kind of spartan landscape that actually resembled the game itself — Let me catch you up. The game sets you up as a settler in the 1800s, with a directive to traverse the Oregon Trail (a real thing!) and make it to the end of the trail without dying. The conceit is naturally that this was a very difficult thing to do for folks back in the day, so the game showed you this. Days would pass, you’d make incremental progress, and disaster of some kind or another would strike, leaving you dead and buried and having to start the process all over again.
It was a good reminder that we, as a generation, have it pretty good not having to battle things like polio because vaccinations and such are good developments making life better for all and … shit, we didn’t learn that at all, did we?
Well, some of us learned that. And as I said before, the underlying implication here was that we’d need to toughen up to deal with crap.
Which I’m okay with. Yeah, let’s not suffer unnecessarily from a completely preventable pandemic or anything like that, but a softball getting line-driven into your arm ain’t such a bad thing. It gives you a terrific bruise to show off to your friends, AND it teaches you to be a little quicker on your feet next time.
The Oregon Trail was like a softball being line-driven into your fleshy bicep.
But getting back to some background, the version of the game that Gen X remembers so vividly is actually a newer iteration of the game. A teacher by the name of Don Rawitsch (OF COURSE it was a teacher who was sadistic enough to develop the thing) created a text-based version of the game back in the early 1970s. The version with wagon graphics and whatnot didn’t come along until 1985.
I remember the 1985 version being more rudimentary looking than these screenshots suggest, but that had more to do with those shitty green Apple monitors every school was using back then to save on money. The game you remembered from school back in the day? Probably the 1985 one (or another one that came along later — they’ve released several updates since then).
Still, the 1985 version was significant because it included graphics to go along with the text-based choices and descriptions of things, and it also added hunting to the mix, a mini-game where you could stop your move to hunt for awhile, which involved your little avatar shooting at random animals that would race across your screen, kind of like a rudimentary Duck Hunt.
Some of the choices the gamer was presented with (apart from hunting) were impossible. There were risky ways to cross rivers and way less risky ways to cross rivers, and yet, you could still lose half your team and all of your supplies no matter which choice you made.
It was like river roulette. Yeah, you could bet on black instead of a specific number, but the casino was still taking all of your food eventually.
Resistance was futile.
A part of this game that I apparently completely blocked from my memory is that you actually got assigned a score at the end of your adventure. It wasn’t enough for you to lose your entire party to typhoid and drown a couple of teams of oxen. No, we also have to SCORE those efforts in an attempt to make you feel even worse.
“Yes, you somehow made it to the end. Congrats. The Russian judge awards you a 2.3.”
But we kept playing this game anyway! And we all still love it to this day. Spoiler alert: I’m giving this thing a perfect score, and it’s sitting here in my Top 20.
Why? Apparently I’m a masochist. And so is all of Gen X.
Are you a masochist? Chances are you played this game as a kid.
So what makes it worth playing today?
It’s probably THE definitive educational game. And it’s still fun to play, in a “softball line drive into your arm” kind of way.
Hey, at least you have NOT died of dysentery.
Dave’s Score: 10/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (Old-as-hell PCs or Apples)
- Archive.org
- Android/iPhone apps