Ways I spent my time while playing Oregon Trail in elementary school
Ways I spent my time while playing Oregon Trail in elementary school
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I’ve never played this game. Ever.
You missed out on a valuable part of childhood.
indeed, where else could you die of dysentary and/or be crushed by your wagon during school hours?
Or have all your children drown after naming them after people you hate?
I never heard of this game before I got on this site.
Was it ever published anywhere in Europe? Doubt it.
Probably, but computers weren’t in vogue yet.
For all of you who missed out, there’s an online emulator where you can play it (and others):
http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html
No, its because you were still dicking about with Apple IIs when we had all, at the least, got with the BBC Micro, then swiftly on to more advanced machines. At the time we would have been playing Oregon Trail in the USA on an 8 bit, sub-1Mhz, 6 colour monstrosity using 5 inch discs, my school had a (still awful, but better) PC-XT (8 bit bus, BUT an 8mhz 16-bit chip) with EGA graphics and a 3.5 inch drive… and a mouse! And then quickly moved up to a heady mix of Acorn Archimedes and other fully 16-bit machines. Come on, now.
Oh and all that stuff about learning the everyday minutiae of a certain period of history for a small proportion of the population of an entirely different country. Our programs were more to do with spelling and maths and science and music & all that (Caxton Press, anyone? Or that data logging / remote control thing that interfaced with Lego?). Except for the one about the Domesday book (which never even made it to my school), and another that touched on life in a Victorian city that each of us got to play for about 15 minutes. Once.
The out-and-out arcadeish games like OT were more relegated to the home environment. I think the closest we got to that sort of thing was the rather lame “Granny’s Garden”. Which, preposterously, is still available to play online somewhere…
Considering it was celebrating/teaching about something significant in American history, probably not. You guys had way better historical events to play games with. Did you have an Inquisition game? I would play that.
Probably not, Bee, since it’s about the Oregon Trail, which is big part of AMERICAN history. The Oregon Trail (real thing) really didn’t affect the rest of the world, just the US, so it makes sense for it to not be distributed outside of there.
WHAT?! You aren’t from California, then! No, you can’t even be American! Imposter!!!
Hey–I’m American–and Californian–and I have never played that game because I was homeschooled…
I remember that game.
in the boy’s and girls club i went to as a child we had that game on the computers and i played it a couple of times, hunting WAS the best.
Much of my knowledge of diseases came from that game.
Three tons of buffalo wouldn’t be very much, actually, considering a buffalo can weight 1,000 to 2,000 pounds (1/2 to 1 ton) apiece.
but three tons of squirrel? that’s a lot.
This is reminding me of the ton of feathers and ton of rocks question.
THE FEATHERS WEIGH MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s not much when you’re on the Oregon Trail…it lasts a couple days, then you lose it crossing the river. =(
its bison…nobody seems to get this animal right. buffalo live in africa. its like if you called a poodle a hyena. yes they are kind of related (distantly) but WAY different species that dont even exist in remotely close areas.
like the buffalo i live in africa well actualy i moved back to america 7 years ago but whatever
I dunno, I think I’d swap the “disk reading” for “dysentary”
Agreed. Actually I’d make dysentary about 45%, cholera 25%, malaria 10%, getting mauled by a bear 5%, getting your wagon trained robbed 5%, and having your wagon drowned in a river 10%.
this game was totally awesome..everyone always looked forward to computer lab day so we could all play it
It doesn’t list the best way of all – starving the people in your party and tipping wagons in the river! I liked playing it at school enough that my parents bought it for me at home.
Yeah! Especially when we were all mean spiteful third graders, and named the people in your party names of kids you didn’t like…and THEN starved them, started them with NO rations, and made them ford an 8 foot river! Lol. Good times.
Haha, we must be soul-mates. I got detention in 3rd grade for telling my teacher I hoped she got dysentery.
My first attempt involved my stupid partner deciding to ford a six-foot-deep river and costing us 650 pounds of food and all three kids.
The rabbits were the hardest to shoot, man. Also, we used to have competitions in class on how many buffalo we could kill in the time period. the record was like 8. Ahh, early lessons on environmental negligence and waste.
I was always sad to have to shoot vitural animals
So true. Tons of fun considering it was school.
For me, the largest slice would be attempting to fjord the river.. unsuccessfully.
fjord the river?
you mean like pining for them?
I spent most of my time killing the three tons of buffalo, then being pissed off you were only able to carry 100 lbs. back to your wagon. The rest was left to rot. What a jip.
Floppy disks! The CD’s and flash drives of my childhood. They were fun to eject. They came in pretty colors eventually, too.
i would do the same thing, i remember once i killed like 30 buffalo and my teacher got pissed and kicked me off. then she lecture about how thts why buffalo are endangered
…and then tell her that teachers are endangered because they’re too dumb to realize that when you’re starving to death, ‘endangered’ means ‘eat it while you have a chance’.
i TOTALLY did the same thing. huge win.
Why is “fording the river” not on this graph
Because you’re meant to caulk the wagon and float it.
Because NOBODY wants to pay the 5 dollars for a ferry.
I always paid five bucks for the ferry.
I just played it to watch all the people die. I named my party bob, kenny, kyle, antman, and other random stuff and got them killed on purpose. xD
I named them after people I didn’t like.
For me, Make red the size of blue, Get rid of blue, and make the res be “Make wagon ultra heavy, attempt to float across river.”
I played a more graphical version of this years ago, on a mac. Didn’t realise it was educational, I just thought the hunting was great! That, and killing the people by moving on very time they got infected with something!
Was it all sepia tone, and the shooting bit was more like a sniping game? If it was, I would get a Mac just to get that version back. Ah, good times, good times.
Oregon Trail II. That was actually pretty interesting.
You forgot one:
“Killing off your classmates by intentionally not resting while they were all sick.”
We never had this in Canada, either.
I feel so deprived.
Sort of.
I was in a little rural area in BC, and I had this. Where were you? Manitoba?
SUPERLOL!!!
OMG!
There needs to be a section for “purposely killing yourself just so you can make up clever tombstone epitaphs.”
Yeah, like…
“Here lies poop.”
Yeah, that dysentery thing is why I always took a sack lunch.
you forgot naming the people “dick” and “asshole,” and then letting them die so you can read “asshole has died of dysentery.”
i died so many times in this game, and everytime i played, every two days we´d come across another grave from an old game. i think i put elvis and marilyn monroe as characters specifically so i could make a cool tombstone.
I totally played that in elementary school, i miss it so much, i would totally kick ass at it now
at my school, it totally had way better graphics, wayyyyyy bettter
Actually being on the trail was easy, you just make your progress like 1,000 miles a day.
AAHhhhh i loved this game. Me and my sis used to see how fast we could kill everyone. I actually thought that was the goal of the game till i was 8
Floppy disk? Some us played this on hard-copy text terminals jacked into a dial-up system.
When i was little, all the girls protested the boys hunting in the game. They said it taught them bad morals. ha ha ha ha
What about the part where you named all your party after people you didn’t like and then drowned/starved/dysentary’d them? …I am pretty sure that is the only way people played that game at my school.
I like to name my people things like “Someone” and “Nobody” and “My Right Arm.”
My Right Arm got a broken leg.
Nobody died of dysentry.
SEE? FUNNIES!!
Only 3 tons? YOU, my friend, are very LAZY!!!!!!
I actually bought this game because I liked playing it so much.
All I ever did was bring my group down with diseases, killing them off one by one.
That game ROCKED! I usually died from drowning in the river, though. I stuck it out through dysentery. But I shot a crapload of squirrels and buffalos.
thats awesome, i had this conversation many times before and concluded that thats exactly what happened to all the american buffalo real life.
You forgot to add getting your main character killed so you can write something on the tombstone….like the word POOP, or Oregon sucks. Elementary school…it was a simpler time.
Floppy discs? Graphics? YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!
I played OREGON TRAIL on the TIES system in Minneapolis–the computer was (I recall) an HP 2000C with drum memory, in another part of town! We used Teletype® ASR-33 teleprinters with big rolls of yellow paper, paper-tape readers to record our BASIC programs, and 110-baud acoustic coupler modems built in (they kind you actually put the phone into a pair of rubber cups–like in the movie WAR GAMES) This was in high school, in 1972-75. And yet, it was the same game–get to Oregon alive by creative resource management.
(I believe OREGON TRAIL is the oldest proprietary computer game still published–chess, etc. all being generic. )
And yes, I AM an old fart….
dont forget (depending on how old you were) spending about 10-15% of the time thinking up “crass” names for your characters, like stupid or shut up or – if you were really daring – butt/butthead…