4 Ways ‘The Oregon Trail’ Led A Generation On A Journey

School classrooms used to be a whole lot different. Though I’m purely speculating, I can only imagine that these days, your average middle school classroom is just a bunch of kids all using their smartphones at their desks, constantly recording coordinated dance numbers to post online while a disinterested teacher sits at their desk, also on their smartphone, complaining online about how kids need to slow down with the dance videos. 

Back in my day, all the way back in the ’90s, the only screen we had in our classrooms was on a hulking personal computer tucked away somewhere in the back. And on that computer, on just about any given morning, before the bell rang, you would find a group of kids, huddled around that monitor, giggling at the fact that one of their buddies just died the horrific death of someone who shit so much diarrhea that their body just couldn’t shit any diarrhea no more, all in an effort to cross some stupid ass river. We couldn’t reach into our pockets and have the literal world at our fingertips; we had … pixelated Oregon. And that’s about it. 

But even still, The Oregon Trail, and the cultural phenomenon it spawned, was an incredible achievement and one, now at 50 years old, that went on its own risky westward trek to become part of the public consciousness as we know it …

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4

Hitting the Trail

The Oregon Trail wasn’t originally the game that most of us have in mind. Far before the version that most of us had on our classroom computers, The Oregon Trail was just an idea in the mind of Don Rawitsch, a student-teacher looking for a way to keep his kids engaged. Talk about going above and beyond as a student-teacher. I thought a student teacher’s entire role was to sit beside the real teacher and try not to barf on the spinning desk globe up front because of last night’s bender. Where, after they bared hangover bard, they’d accidentally spin the globe and then send an educational barf tornado all over a geography class and call it a day. Standard student-teacher stuff. 

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Don got his roommates, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger, to code an extremely rudimentary, text-based adventure game designed to teach the kids about our perilous history towards westward expansion. Maybe Don just had a really bad class? One that was out there not learning shit, and this was his Hail Mary to get them engaged. It’s like a teacher today going home frustrated, developing the next big social media platform for his students, but it secretly requires basic Algebra to actually go ahead and post that absolutely worthless dancing video. They just have no clue what’s happening behind the scenes.

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Believe it or not, The Oregon Trail wasn’t always this stunning visually.

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Either way, Don, Bill, and Paul worked on his project and eventually got it ready for Don’s classroom in Minnesota. Now, remember, whenever I’m saying “computer” here, you need to picture these ’70s computers. They look more like someone just ran a bunch of glue overtop a Casio keyboard and threw it into another Casio keyboard. Super rudimentary and crude, his game matched the capabilities. Playing out exclusively through text, the original Oregon Trail worked by presenting options and game narratives through physical paper, with the students going on hunts or buying supplies simply by typing. This version of the game takes the already-basic, extremely simplified edition of The Oregon Trail that most of us have in our heads and drops a damn nuke on it. 

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Still, the kids loved it. Don probably knew he had a hit as soon as his students typed in “B-A-N-G” when prompted to shoot the deer in front of them, and the class erupted in a “Let’s Gooooooo!” as the deer bled out on paper. This was a make-or-break moment for Don. One that all teachers go through. Where either they’ve got the next great idea for their classroom, one the students will click with and make their semester that much easier, or they decided, in an effort to be “cool,” to teach the Louisiana Purchase through an elaborate rap that was recorded by their students, put up online, and resulted in them not being fired. Not because their rap contained questionable words, but because the world simply will not stand for rapping history teachers in its classrooms. Luckily for Don, he went the programming route, and his creation was just about to take off.