Remember The Oregon Trail? The educational strategy video game that was first released on the Apple II in 1985? If so, then you might be surprised to know that the story dates all the way back to 1971, when Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger developed a text-only version of the game.
The original 1971 text game was coded in around 800 lines of HP Time-Shared BASIC for the Minneapolis school district’s HP 2100 minicomputer. Schools could connect to that minicomputer with a teleprinter. It wasn’t until 1985 did the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), led by game designer R. Philip Bouchard, release the version where 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 on the Oregon Trail in 1848.
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