The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail is a text-based strategy video game developed by Carleton College students Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) beginning in 1975. It was developed as a computer game to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. In the game, the player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon via a covered wagon in 1847. Along the way the player must purchase supplies, hunt for food, and make choices on how to proceed along the trail while encountering random events such as storms and wagon breakdowns. The original versions of the game contain no graphics, as they were developed for computers that used teleprinters instead of computer monitors. A later Apple II port added a graphical shooting minigame. The first version of the game was developed over the course of two weeks for use by Rawitsch in a history unit at Jordan Junior High School in Minneapolis. Despite its popularity with the students, it was deleted from the school district's mainframe computer at the end of the school semester. Rawitsch recreated the game in 1974 for the MECC, which distributed educational software for free in Minnesota and for sale elsewhere, and recalibrated the probabilities of events based on historical journals and diaries for the game's release the following year. After the rise of microcomputers in the 1970s, the MECC released several versions of the game over the next decade for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, and Commodore 64 computers, before redesigning it as a graphical commercial game for the Apple II under the same name in 1985. The game is the first entry in The Oregon Trail series; games in the series have since been released in many editions by various developers and publishers, many titled The Oregon Trail.

Source: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 — The Oregon Trail (1971 video game) · retrieved October 19, 2026

Text is shortened from the original article; the full version is linked.

Developer

Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium

Publisher

Broderbund

First release

January 1, 1971

Series

The Oregon Trail

Cover

Official thumbnail

Record ID

Q1574053