Me too. Played it in 1989 on a monochrome monitor in my 5th grade classroom.
One time, one of my friends was doing really well. We all sucked at it, so the teacher let him continue further and further. While we all went back to “learning”, he continued until he beat it. We all gathered around it to look at the ending.
I’m telling you. Games were a more mystical experience back then. 
Hah, that was awesome. I was totally that son, too. Never really got the hang of the idea that you were selecting your difficulty level based on your profession. I’d wonder why everybody else was dying of cholera or capsizing their wagons left and right while my family rode, fat and happy, at a relaxed pace through the wilderness, making friends with friendly Indians and single-handedly wiping the West clean of the buffalo infestation.
Heh found an online version of the game. Played a farmer got through it with no losses. Either I really didn’t get this game as a kid or I got really lucky this playthrough.
You shot 378,364 pounds of food, but were only able to carry 100 back to the wagon.
Yep, and I see naming your family after swear words was a widespread phenomenon too. Had to quickly move ahead when the teacher came by. We did computers during our library class (circa 1990) and Oregon Trail day was definitely one of the most anticipated days of the year.
ETA: What pissed me off were the deaths out of nowhere. Going along just fine and dandy. Whole wagon team was fat and happy. Then BAM…“Ass died from cholera.” You didn’t even give me a chance to rest. 
Well, you really do die quite quickly from cholera. That’s one thing that was educational about Oregon Trail - everybody had to look up what the hell dysentery was. And how cool is that - you poop yourself to death! (Well, cool from a fourth grade sort of perspective.)
I have that shirt but it’s black and looks like this, which is how it looked when I played it.
I played originally in the late 80s-early 90s. I finished it quite a few times but I died of dysentery more often.
I also played a newer version in the late 90s when I was babysitting and the girls were asleep and I got bored. Their parent’s told me to feel free to use their computer and I was so excited when I found the game but while the newer version looked cool, it was too easy to beat and it looked too…new.
I also have a version on my iPod.
Heh, the emulator is fun, only a thief came by and stole EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY BULLETS.
Wow, that was tough - after I lost all my bullets we spent several days with 0 pounds of food! And then I bought some more bullets and we had a wagon fire which burned up guess what? So I spent the rest of my farmer dollars on bullets and then they fell out of my wagon in a river. I made it, though - 2676 points.
I grew up playing Oregon Trail in Oregon. It was like I was trying to get home. I don’t think I ever made it.
I remember the muncher games.
I remember the MECC educational games. Growing up in Wisconsin we got a lot of MECC games in school, since Minnesota was right next door and all.
In high school, our French teacher put “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” on our Mac network. The French version.
Anyway, I remember the lemonade stand game. (And was always amused how a 50% chance of rain meat no rain at all, and a 30% chance of rain meant automatic thunderstorm. Talk about lazy programmers who never heard of the “rand” function (or an equivalent in whatever language they were using).
And I remember playing the old Apple II Oregon trail where hunting involved a pixelated deer that ran across the screen and you hit the space bar to fire your gun at it, and every time you fire you automatically use 6 bullets which were arranged in a triangle. However, I don’t recall their being a 100 lb restriction in that one. I think you kept all the meat you managed to kill.
Then later I remember the updated Oregon Trail game being installed on the Mac Network.
The Apple ][e version definitely did have the 100 pounds of game limit, since that’s the only one I ever played, and I clearly remember it.
Amazingly, I’d never realized that back when I was playing. I did like, though, how road construction on your street was either really bad (because all of your customers were kept off the street) or really good (because all the road workers bought lemonade).
Wow, I had no idea that the game was that old. I played the Apple ][ MECC version in elementary school in the 80s. Me and my friend were the only people in the class who could get to Oregon, and we refused to reveal our secrets (duh, carry a spare tire, don’t waste money on food when you can go hunting, stop to rest when someone is sick, and NEVER try to float the boat across the river!!!)
It wasn’t until YEARS later when I played the game on an emulator that I discovered that the “pepperoni and cheese” tombstone was actually programmed into the game, and not by a classmate.
Oh yes, and speaking of other MECC games in the 4th grade classroom.
Number/Word/Fraction Munchers - I used to slap anybody who called the protagonist a “frog”. He’s a MUNCHER, asshole! Read the fucking manual! Also, I figured out the keyboard shortcut to edit the top 10 scores, so I wrote myself in for 999,999 points for all 10 places. If you want to play legit in Fraction Munchers, the “less than or more than 1/2” category was by far the easiest
Odell Lake - there was a rule that you played until you died (even if your time ran into the beginning of the next lesson). I learned the patterns, so I NEVER died. I went at it for 2 hours once. The entire classroom (including the teacher) was PISSED.
It’s a shame they didn’t know how to diagnose for AS back in 1989…
There was also some math game which had a spaceship theme, but it wasn’t nearly as fun.
We had Carmen Sandiego too, but we didn’t have the Almanac, so it was impossible to get by the copy protection. I also remember that all of these 5.25 disks had hand-written labels on them, so there was some in-school piracy going on there.
And holy shit did I get in trouble the day I brought my copy of Police Quest for school. You know, the one where the first thing you do is walk into the locker room and type “take off clothes”…
Organ Trail, a re-imagining of the game as a trek across a zombie wasteland America.
I remember reading an article about the programmers who created Oregon Trail. They actually researched how many people took the trail through the most popular time period, found out how many wagon trains ran into serious calamities (like breaking an axle, snake bites, dysentery) then added a probability generator that would give you these maladies at the appropriate percentages.
Oh yeah, that’s the one I played. I always selected the lowest level of shooting ability, even though I was pretty good - you got more chances at deer that way. It was a fool’s choice to select “marksman;” then you got one chance and that was it.
You’re right. I recall that now.
My fucking God! That is awesome, thank you sir!
I hope I didn’t miss it, but I didn’t see where anyone else had posted the trailer to the “upcoming” movie. So many classic lines:
“We’re not going to learn anything.”
Like ol’ Poopface
I’ll take 4 oxen and as many bullets $1600 will buy me.
My favorite was always factors. It was enough to be a challenge, but then you got a respite every so often when you hit a prime number. I think I got as far as level 30-something once.
