The Oregon Trail (series)
| The Oregon Trail | |
|---|---|
| Genres | Edutainment |
| Developers | MECC |
| Publishers |
Brøderbund The Learning Company Gameloft |
| Creators | Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, Paul Dillenberger |
| Platform of origin | HP 2100 |
| Year of inception | 1971 |
| First release |
The Oregon Trail December 3, 1971 |
| Latest release |
The Oregon Trail: American Settler 2011 |
| Spin-offs |
The Amazon Trail The Yukon Trail MayaQuest: The Mystery Trail Africa Trail |
The Oregon Trail is a series of educational computer games that began with the very first edition originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.
In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an 8th grade history class as a student teacher. He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on an HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help.
The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on December 3, 1971. Despite bugs, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to others on Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service. When the next semester ended, Rawitsch deleted the program, but he printed out a copy of the source code.
In 1974, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a state-funded organization that developed educational software for the classroom, hired Rawitsch. He rebuilt the game, adding events for choices based on the actual historical probabilities for what happened to travelers on the trail at each location in the game. He based much of the options in the game on historical narratives of people on the trail that he had read. Rawitsch uploaded The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota. The game became one of the network's most popular programs, with thousands of players monthly.
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