Oh, god, I played this dozens of times in high school but I also don’t think I ever made it to Oregon. I hardly remember it though.
No, what’s sad is how long I looked around for the right wording. I did play this game a bunch. I never got anywhere close to Oregon and I killed an awful lot of buffalo. Today I’m a vegetarian. I wonder if it’s related.
Awe to the some.
As I recall it took a while to really get it down - by the end there my dad and I were vying for the top ten screen and had pushed all the generic names off, and nobody was a “greenhorn” anymore. Can’t imagine what it was we did that was “better”, though - hunted for food a lot, paid the guide when we had the cash, did a lot of Float Down the Columbia River…
One of the weird quirks I’ve noticed regarding “Oregon Trail” is how people pronounce the title. Virtually everyone I know pronounces the word “Oregon,” by itself, with a heavy stress on the first syllable and a soft “U” sound in the last syllable (“OAR-eh-gunn”). However, when speaking about the game, they inevitably switch up the pronunciation so there’s more of a stress on the last syllable, which is also pronounced “GONE” (as in “oar-eh-GONE trail”).
I’ve lived on both coasts and heard people doing this in both, so I don’t think it’s a regional thing. It’s uncanny.
Awww, this thread takes me back. We had a single computer in my … lesseee … 3rd or 4th grade classroom, and getting to play Oregon Trail was a reward from the teacher for stuff, mostly. I remember us all crowding around the seated player, trying to armchair quarterback the game. Those rabbits were kinda hard to shoot!
Had one of the Carmen Sandiegos on my home computer. It was the “Where in Time?” one, and I played that one a LOT.
Mem’ries …
Those were the fastest squirrels in the world, I can tell you that. Not to mention that when those bears and bison got moving vertically, it’s time to kiss that meat goodbye!
Not even worth shooting at the squirrels.
Yeah, I never bothered with anything but deer, bison, or bear. And of course, once you bag two deer or one bison or bear, you might as well head back to the wagon.
Incidentally, I have actually eaten bear meat. It’s pretty tasty (greasy, but I like grease).
Oh man, that game takes me back! I remember lots of fun situations, like having your last Ox croak or breaking an axle without any spares, I think you had to wait around until a trader came by who would sell you one.
I vaguely remember playing a fish game on an Apple clone at school. I don’t remember playing Oregon Trail much at school, but I’m sure we had it. I played the hell out of that game at home on an Apple IIGS. My school also had a game called Freedom, where you play as a slave trying to escape from the South. Apparently it was a bit controversial.
There was another game about a rabbit and some carrots; I’m pretty sure it was math-based; there was a copy on every computer in the lab, and sessions with this game were treated as classroom time.
Edited to add: I also had an updated version for Windows, but it wasn’t quite as fun for some reason…the updated graphics took something away from the experience. Hunting was still fun though (and yes, you could still only haul 100 pounds of meat back to the wagon!)
You know you want pepperoni and cheese on your tombstone.
Wait! I want pepperony and chease.
Something about pulling up carrots in a garden, and you either got a whole carrot, a half-eaten carrot, or the carrot with the bunny still holding onto it? I think that was one of the MECC ones where you had to do five math problems, and then you could play the game for a while, then five more problems, and so on. There were probably hundreds of games that worked that way.
Oh, and then there was Grammar Examiner, where you had to move around on a board and fix up the grammar in newspaper stories. Anyone remember that one?
My daughter and I loved that game and Amazon Trail!
I never played it. We had a TRS 80 and the early games I remember were stuff like Hammurabi and Adventure. But here’s a perfectly good McSweeney’s about about a father disowning his son over Oregon Trail.
First played and owned on my Apple II clone. I also Played on my friend’s Commodore 64. Awesome game. I also have The iPhone version, though it’s much more advanced, of course.
As for awesome old Apple II games, my favorite was Karateke. Sweet.
I remember one occasion playing that lemonade game. I went first and, not really having a whole lot of real-world experience with lemonade stands, foolishly priced my wares waaaay too high. Didn’t sell a thing. It was just wretched. If only I had had the sense to rope the other players into establishing a lemonade cartel; we could have squeezed all kinds of imaginary dollars out of those imaginary customers! Oh, well.
THE MILEAGE IS INDEPENDENT OF THE OXEN!? WTF!?!?!!?!?
i disown myself.
Yeah, a year or two ago, at a party with some physics students, one of them had gotten an emulator running on his computer, and we all crowded around to watch him play. I was simply dumbfounded that it was even possible to just play the banker and solve every problem in the game just by throwing money at it. He paid every ferryman or Indian to cross a river. He bought more food whenever he stopped, even at exorbitant frontier-fort prices. He never once even bothered to go hunting. And he made it Oregon, quickly and easily. It was almost like it wasn’t even the same game.
Ah yes. Between this and the series of Muncher games, computer time at elementary school was the best!