In 2011, Universe published the ghoulishly-titled book 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die[1]. The obvious question then follows, “Well, what’s number one?” The list’s ordered chronologically, but even so, it’s a game called The Oregon Trail. It’s from the mid 70’s. Today that makes it vintage, ten years ago it was old school, and ten years before I’d guess it was old fashion or whatever people said back then.
Oregon Trail was first made c.1971 by a trio of student teachers working out of Cerleton College, wanting to make a game that would help teach kids about the Oregon Trail – a culturally emphasized trail that followed an east-west trajectory on the north American continent during the mid 19th century. The game migrated over to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium a few years later, and was adapted various times to work on Apple IIcomputers throughout the late ’70s to early ’80s. Since then it’s been adapted for windows, and given a few updates. Most significantly, for contemporary readers: the game was remade for Facebook earlier this year!
The past is a foreign country, they play games differently there. The classic Oregon Trail was played off a 5¼ disk on an Apple II.
I’ve seen 5¼” floppy disks, and I’ve got confused memories of the computers that used them. My school still hoarded a few well into the ’90s, perhaps figuring that the young ones didn’t need anything better. I can remember a writing program and instructions on how to use it: Put the disk with your name into the computer – the story you were writing came up on screen, ready to be continued from last week – if you want to add a picture, change the disk to the “Pictures” disk, choose a picture, and then put the first disk back in. Some computers had space for two disks, and you could add pictures without changing disks.
Skip forward to today: Go onto google and download the Apple II emulator AppleWin and the Oregon Trail ROM, then play.
I suspect something’s been lost in translation.
The game sets the player as an ambiguously-detailed American sojourner who wishes to take their family over to Oregon. To start off, the player chooses whether to be a banker, a carpenter, or a farmer, each of which starts the game with differing amounts of cash, thus illustrating the understudied correlation between socioeconomics and rates of dysentery.
After choosing names for his family the vagabond hero goes shopping with the currency he presumably acquired from selling his failing banking/carpeting/farming business. The player chooses how many oxen, caravan bits, food, and such, to carry and then heads off west.
The game is spent either travelling – in which case an animation of a caravan plays – or, well, not travelling. Everything is done on a keyboard, and most of that is by pressing numbers to indicate a choice. So when for instance, the nomadic family reach a fort and take a break, a series of options present themselves: Press 8 to trade, press 6 to get rest some, or press 1 to get the hell out of town before your family become accustomed to the place and start nagging you to just settle down here and forget all about the west coast, because why would you presume that life will be any better there, and aren’t you just running away from yourself?
When travelling, that is, while watching an animation of a rolling caravan, your food stocks go down, and from time to time you’ll be interrupted by a message telling you (without judging you) that your wife’s arm is broken, or that you’re lost, or that something needs fixing. Additionally, you can stop to check out the lay of the land, during which you can choose to speed up, change your family’s rations, or go hunting. Hunting, presumably, was included not only to simulate the desperate nature of those who took to the trail, but also to provide a break from the monotony of travel and mysterious injuries. Pixelated-you walks around a pixelated background and shoots pixelated animals that sprint across the screen. Obviously, it’s a matter of contrast, but it’s actually pretty fun.
Eventually, you get to the other side of America and all is finally well. There’s no proper epilogue, cause apparently it really was all about the journey. Having said that, the game scores the player, attributing points to the ratio of the number of family members who leave the east coast and arrive at the west coast, or how much food you still have.
This highlights the final lesson of Oregon Trail: the difference between loss and victory is slighted by the realisation that, for those who know they could do better, success is an illusion.
Miscellaneous final words:
Why are Americans so interested in the Oregon Trail? Australian’s, by comparison, have the Burke and Wills expedition, but don’t seem to have fixated on it to the same degree. I suspect that Yanks pride themselves on their continent’s early (European) frontier culture, whereas Aussies still aren’t sure whether to claim settlement history for themselves (qua convicts) or the Brits.
To elaborate on the ambitiously-named-CaptainSuperBoy‘s node: Word on the street suggests that some guy named Andy is responsible for the pepperoni and cheese tombstone, making reference to an ad by Tombstone Pizza reading “What do you want on your tombstone?” Due to how well known this joke is, I suspect that either pepperoni cheese was a proto-meme, imitated by hundreds, or else that it’s some sort of Easter Egg joke, already written into the main program. I can’t tell. See especially here, but note that a few variant (mis)spellings are quoted around the net.
References: Wikipedia. But Achewood‘s better: 1/2/3/4.
[1] Insofar as I can tell, this is in imitation, rather than in relation, to the other hoards of 1001…Before You Die books.
