Oregon Trail - Developing A Classic

Via Press the Buttons, an interview on the site Deadly Hippos with Philip Bouchard, designer for the original "Oregon Trail". The classic game of food, hunting, and cholera was a staple for many folks around my age growing up, and the piece makes for interesting reading. From the article: "Unfortunately, in real life it was all too easy to kill a buffalo with a rifle. In later decades hunters would kill vast numbers of buffalos and take only the tongues. So I wanted kids to feel a sense of shame for killing too much and then wasting the kill. That was one of the reasons for allowing the player to carry back no more than 200 pounds of meat. I wanted the kids to develop a sense of conservation while playing the game - to say "We should not shoot more meat than we can carry". Our field testing showed that this lesson was indeed effective."

Comments

Oh, is that what I was supposed to learn?

[oni]

I wanted the kids to develop a sense of conservation while playing the game - to say "We should not shoot more meat than we can carry". Our field testing showed that this lesson was indeed effective.

uh, I think the feild testing was in error. Because I killed the heck out those animals and never felt the slightest guilt about it. Hunting kicked ass. I don't think I ever even made it to Oregon. My purpose was just to spend all my money on bullets and go hunting.

Re:Oh, is that what I was supposed to learn?

[Dachannien]

You used 87 bullets and shot 4350 pounds of meat, but you could only carry 200 pounds back to the wagon.

Re:Oh, is that what I was supposed to learn?

[Dixie_Flatline]

Hah. Not only that, but I'd put everyone on starvation rations and kill them off until I was the only one left! Then I'd gorge myself on my vast stores of buffalo.

Re:Oh, is that what I was supposed to learn?

[Profcrab]

There was an Oregon? Whoa. I think the game needed to give you an option to just setup shop and sell meat and skins.

Re:Oh, is that what I was supposed to learn?

[AllahsAvatar]

You are only allowed 100 pounds of meat. I am playing it now.
Take that stupid buffalo.

Re:Oh, is that what I was supposed to learn?

[Meagermanx]

Memories of my sister exclaiming "No, don't shoot the buffalo! The indians will get mad at you!" ensue.

Hilarity Ensues

[American AC in Paris]

[OBVIOUS] Slashdot chasing Fark's tail for choice bits 'o news. Your dog wants CowboyNeal. (CT: yeah, it's a dupe. Whoopty-dee.)

[OBVIOUS] Slashdot chasing Fark's tail for choice bits 'o news. Your dog wants CowboyNeal.

Relive a Memory!

[DavidLeeRoth]

Use AppleWin to emulate an Apple 2 Game. Download the Oregon Trail images from Here. After getting both pieces of software, load each disk image into a separate emulated drive in the emulator, then press run. Enjoy!

Re:Relive a Memory!

[Kleedrac2]

Wow ... thank you!!! Rock on man!!

Kleed

Re:Relive a Memory!

[Anonymous Coward]

pssh i still have the cd with the original cd case for pc

Re:Relive a Memory!

[apoc06]

my exgirlfriend will give me ___ for life thanks to that link!

Fording the river

[dsands1]

To date I've probably broken in excess of 10 keyboards and 30 mouse playing games over the years. The very first keyboard was a victim of my rage due to failing repeatedly to ford that damned river!

Re:Fording the river

[MBraynard]

Should have used a Chevy.

Re:Fording the river

[SamBeckett]

They didn't have Fords in 1848 Mr. Dumass.

friends with diseases

[beowulfy]

I remember that my favorite thing to do while playing the game with my friends at school, was to use the name of my friends for the in-game family. Then I would purposefully set the rations to meager and the pace to the fastest possible. Then I would laugh my best evil laugh as I watched all my friends get horrible diseases! Josh has Cholera!, Dusty has Typhoid Fever, Katie has broken her leg! Muwahahahahahaha! Oh to be so easily amused.......

Re:friends with diseases

[tsa]

Did you put your pinky to your mouth, and did everyone laugh with you because they were afraid to be killed?

Takes me back...

[Shadow Wrought]

To fifth grade. I remember the hunting part involving hitting the button when the animal first appeared. The shot would then slowly work its way down range as the animal, equally slowly, would work its way towards the center. At the time I thought it was pretty dumb to have to shoot before the animal was in your targets. With a decade (or two) of hindsight, I guess they were trying to force you to lead the deer, but for a fifth grader, I thought it was just stupid.

I also, for the longest time, thought that "Miscellaneous" was just a fancy term for medicine, since that's primarily what I equated to the "miscellaneous" category of supplies.

While part of me is interested in playing Oregon Trail again, I think I'd much rather play Gato ; the first game to really hook me.

Re:Takes me back...

[usrusr]

don't _ever_ underestimate the speed at which gato runs on a modern system. set a circling course and minor imperfections in the calculation of the circle will take you everywhere on the map within seconds.

(yes i know about the possibility to use an emulator instead)

ps: cga rocks

Re:Takes me back...

[Shadow Wrought]

I tried running it once on a modern system. It made a horendous beeping sound, flashed images across the screen, and I died. All in roughly 3 seconds. So yeah, my next attempt will likely include an emulator somewhere in the equation;-)

I also believe, unless I am mistaken, that Gato had a hot key which would pause game play and bring up a fake spreadsheet, thus protecting your game play from the evils of management;-)

Don't Read It

[MBCook]

I loved Oregon Trail, as I'm sure many others did. Do you're self a favor and DON'T read this article. While the guy gives good answers and manages to be civil, the "interviewer" asks questions like he's an 8 year old. Tell you what, I'll post back with the interview text only changing those terrible questions to more reasonable ones.

Re:Don't Read It

[MBCook]

1. The game commences with the player asked to choose among three choices: Banker from Boston, Carpenter from Ohio. and Farmer from Illinois. Was there ever any discussion of including a Slave Owner from Mississippi?

I wanted to have 3 difficulty levels representing different amounts of initial resources. We tied this into the real world by connecting these levels to 3 different professions. This was also an opportunity to get kids to think about the fact that the emigrants came from different places and had different backgrounds.

Although we did not choose to address slavery issues with this product, a decade later I worked on another historical simulation game called Pony Express Rider, published by McGraw-Hill Home Interactive. In this product we addressed the slavery issue quite directly.

After The Oregon Trail, but before Pony Express Rider, I designed and programmed two other historical simulation games (both published by MECC) that also dealt squarely with ethnic relations - Lewis & Clark Stayed Home, and Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? In Lewis & Clark you explore the American West, interacting with dozens of different Native American communities. In Dr. Livingstone you explore Africa, interacting with dozens of different African ethnic groups.

2. Were you ever informed that some religious schools in the south insisted their students select Carpenter from Ohio because Jesus was a carpenter? Was it your intent to cloak the Carpenter from Ohio in religious symbolism?

I had never heard this before, and any religious symbolism in the product is purely accidental. But I was born and raised in the Deep South, so I witnessed on many occasions the deep attachment that many southerners have to their religious beliefs.

3. [Stupid question about the general store owner's name being Matt]

I understand that Matt is short for Mathew, a name with a very long history. The son of the then-president of MECC was also named Matt, and our president was convinced that we named the store's proprietor after his son. Please don't let him know the real story - he would be so disappointed!

4. Matt's character has a pipe. If this game were designed today do you believe you would be required to remove the pipe from Matt's mouth? Did you feel any responsibility about the high rate of tobacco use among children of the 1980's?

If all those kids had taken up pipe smoking, then I would definitely feel guilty - but I think I'm in the clear! Honestly, if I were to design another Oregon Trail, I don't think we would see Matt using any form of tobacco.

Even back then, any references to tobacco could be controversial. We got away with the pipe for Matt (which was the visual designer's idea - not mine), but in Lewis & Clark I ran into a bigger controversy. The real Lewis & Clark took along tobacco as one of the items to trade with Native Americans. But I was told by the publisher to remove this trade item from the product.

5. How did your team settle on five as the requisite number of individuals attempting the trek on the Oregon Trail and were there any names that were disallowed from selection as choices? For instance are names like stinky, cooties, and gayey allowed?

I chose 5 as the number of individuals on your team strictly from the standpoint of game play, and not for any actual historical reasons. That's one of the rare exceptions, because I made of point of weaving real history or geography into almost all of my other design decisions.

We talked about building a filter to disallow certain terms as keyboard input. This was a concern not only for the name input, but even more so for the gravestone epitaph. However, as we were designing this product to fit on a 2-sided Apple II floppy disk, we didn't have the space to incorporate such a filter. This was just one of many features on our wish list that did not make it into the finished product.

The lack of a profanity filter came back to bite us. Some teachers began to complain that we had

Re:Don't Read It

[hunterx11]

RTFA mods. For that matter, RTFA editors. How is the parent post a troll? Frankly the article is troll. This comment is definitely offtopic, but the parent seems to be the only person posting who has read the article.

OS remake?

[Kleedrac2]

It's always amazed me with all the OSS remakes of classic games (especially ones 20 years old upon which the copyright may have expired) we've never seen a java version of Oregon Trail! Growing up in the 80's you couldn't not have played this game, and I daresay that if you played it it impacted you. If I had more time I'd be very tempted to start a team and put this dream into action. As it stands I'll simply say I'd love to add my $0.02 worth of code to this project should it pop up on sourceforge :)

Kleedrac

Re:OS remake?

[Anonymous Coward]

(especially ones 20 years old upon which the copyright may have expired)

+5 Funny?

Re:OS remake?

[Gulthek]

Born 1979.

Played Oregon Trail - never.

Mail Order Monsters and Autoduel: get me my remakes already! :-)

And Wing Commander.

I'm satisfied with Ultima availability.

Ditto on Atari games.

How about Bard's Tale? C'mon!

That is all.

(Scorched Earth as a bonus game on a console with four controllers would be an amusing blast.)

Re:OS remake?

[vrai]

I was born in '77 and have never played Oregon Trail; I think it was more of a US thing. There was a game that came free with the Spectrum+ that seems to be a bit similar. If I remember correctly you controlled an animal (mainly predators, like Lions) and you moved around a grid based representation of the African plains trying to survive. I hated it because I could never find any prey and my animal always starved to death or was shot by poachers (I was only six at the time).

Luckily the poor quality of games did encourage me to play around with Sinclair BASIC - which ultimately lead to me being paid to write code (and, err, read Slashdot) for a living.

Re:OS remake?

[radish]

Only in the US as far as I can tell. I was born in 75 and never heard of it until recently. For one thing, most schools in the UK (where I grew up) had BBC computers not Apples. The most memorable "educational" games I remember on the BBC were Yellow River Kingdom (which I LOVED) and some thing about selling newspapers - I don't remember the name.

Helpful hint

[sirboxalot]

Caulk your wagon if the river is above 3ft. Also, heres the Apple II emulator: http://www.virtualapple.com/oregontraildisk.html if you'd like to try your hand at avoiding dysentery.

Re:Helpful hint

[Profane Motherfucker]

This fucking rocks. I love this game.

Secrets!

[focitrixilous P]

What he doesn't say in the interview is the secret of Hiram the Blacksmith

Got to buy a wagon and supplies...

Got to get some strong horses...

Got to get them shoed...

Hiram the Blacksmith asks if you would like a cocktail while you wait.

Hijinks ensue! Read Achewood to find out!

Maybe the wrong effect?

[ValuJet]

"We should not shoot more meat than we can carry". Our field testing showed that this lesson was indeed effective."

Since they couldn't carry so much meat it probably taught the kids to eat everything they could while they could. Now our nation is wracked with startling rates of fatties.

Thanks for making our nation fat Oregon Trail!

Primordial Oregon Trail

[kherr]

The original Oregon Trail was on mainframes, created by Don Rawitsch. He brought the game with him when he went to work for MECC, which eventually wrote games for microcomputers (the MECC mainframe was taken down in 1983). You youngins may have had fancy low-resolution graphics, but when I was a kid we had to cross the Oregon Trail by teletype. At 110 baud. On paper.

Actually, it's cool that the game survived with its core design in place from mainframe to microcomputer.

Re:Primordial Oregon Trail

[Scutter]

Oh, man I remember playing that *as* a youngin'. I don't know how or why I had access to it, but I vaguely remember you had to type "BANG" to hunt and the faster you managed to type it, the more likely you were to hit.

100 lbs

[wiljefv]

Actually it was 100 lbs of meat that could be carried back to the wagon in the apple ii version. Being from Minnesota our schools felt a great need to support a local software company and had us play number muncher and oregon trail for about 2-3 hours every week in the late 80s. The 100 lbs limit was definitely annoying. Anyone remember playing the more recent version of the trail for the Apple LC III's?

Re:100 lbs

[macshome]

Dear god yes. I still have the Mac version at home somewhere. We played it to death in college, and soon figured out the formula for high scores.

Play as the teacher, leave extra early, rations on meager, and drive everyone as hard as you could without ending up dead. Skills with hunting were the key, as long as you could stop and hunt well you only needed to buy a few bullets.

I loved when my friends befell terrible fates. "Gerald has broken an arm!", "Chris was bitten by a snake!". A snake? We are in a wagon! Where'd the damn snake come from?

Re:100 lbs

[Profane Motherfucker]

I loved this fucking game. I'd get a shitload of bullets and spend hours laying waste to the buffalos. I remember having a fucking zoo's worth of dead things splattered across the screen, and it would be like "You shot 2,585 pounds of meat, but you can only carry 100 lb back to the wagon." This pissed me off. I remember thinking, "That shit is just going to sit there. There's nothing that's going to touch it. I killed all the fucking animals. Why can't I hike back and pick up the rest?"

I played it both on the Apple II, and the fancy late version. But not on the Mac. I grew up in South Dakota, so I know what you mean about having this part of the essential curriculum. I asked some kids the other day if they still played Oregon Trail. They looked at me like I was doing a fucking robbery. They'd never heard of it. But everyone my age remembers fondly that game.

Being from Minnesota, you probably saw that duck hunting game where you could only shoot the specific kind of ducks. Do you recall that? I was never any good at it. I'd just shoot anything that flew, whether it was legal or not.

But fucking oregon trail. I still remember Jeb dying of dysentery and being pissed at my family, so I'd ford the 25' deep river and kill all the fuckers. That was great.

Everyone reading this...

[crlove]

needs one of these: http://www.bustedtees.com/product.php?name=dysente ry Even if you didn't RTFA.

Try Scorched3d

[jubei]

Scorched3d is a pretty good 3d adaptation, but it may not work the best on a console, there is a lot of camera work that is more easily done with a mouse.

parent is +1 informative

[BitterAndDrunk]

I never got to play it as a kid, just watch others play it. . . and now I can experience some radical gameplay

Agreed

[Strell]

The author has this real smarmy, arrogant attitude throughout the entire interview. HO HO HO, WATCH ME BE FUNNY AS I PESTER THIS MAN.

Aside from some mildly interesting comments next to the photos, the guy is trying so damn hard to be campy. It sounds like something off of a VH1 "Remember ...." show. A bunch of people attempting to be funny and saying the same things you've heard everyone else say a million times over, but because they are not celebrities, their inclusion to such projects is precluded by such hot talent like that guy from some cancelled sitcom.

Someone needs to edit it so that you just get the bare question, and then see the responses.

Re:Agreed

[MBCook]

While there are some interesting questions, so many things weren't asked that I would have. What was the point of the "Jesus" question. Had any of you ever heard that before?

Why not ask some better questions. The interviewee even eludes to some interesting things that are never followed up on. Here are some suggestions:

• Was there anything you had to cut that you really wanted to put in?
• Were you told to add anything that you didn't want?
• Were there any parts of the game that worked much better than you thought they would?
• Did you help with any later versions?
• Which version did you think was best (Apple II, Mac, Dos, Atari, Amiga, Whatever)
• How many lines of code was it?
• What was it written in (I'm guessing Assembly)
• Were there any things you thought of after the game was published that you would have liked to add?
• Etc.

I would have liked to see questions that weren't about Oregon Trail also. The guy mentioned that he was the guy behind Number Munchers. I LOVED that game (especially on the Mac with the little cut-scenes). But they also had a spelling/logic one as I remember too. I'd like to know more about these and other games he made.

While it was an interesting read, it smacked of amateurish journalism, pathetic attempts at humor, and a wasted opportunity. I agree with you completely. It is EXACTLY like something from a "Remember the 80s" special or some vapid show on the Fashion network.

Re:Agreed

[Meagermanx]

Hit the metaphorical nail on the head, there, buddy.
They needed an interviewer with an IQ above 86.
Language filter? It's obvious there wasn't one.
Old wives tale about 800+ pounds of meat? What? Where did that one come from?
And what about those Deadwood and Washington Bullets questions?

Re:Agreed

[einTier]

I wonder if we could get a Slashdot interview with this guy. He seems to be amused by the amount of love that geeks still have for his game.

Re:Agreed

[LWATCDR]

I guess the interviewer never actually took an American history class.
There is a good reason why you couldn't pick a slave owner with slaves. Slavery was not allowed in the western territories. That was one of the big points of friction before the civil war.

Oregon Trail UT Mod

[generic-man]

*space* BOOM! HEADSHOT!

Dachannien is on a killing spree! ... then later ...

Dachannien was looking good until he died of cholera!

Play it online!

[antdude]

Play it online if you have Internet Explorer (ActiveX required). Go to Virtual Apple and load the game up.

Reason to RTFA

[Inmatarian]

One of the questions is this:

Was the phrase "inadequate grass" that appears as the wagon rumbles west an inside joke?

But the funny part is that its answered completely honestly.

I learned alot of strategy

[Mupp252]

It was best to be the banker so that you had more money starting out. Also it was better to start off at a grueling pace so that when they started getting worn out towards the end you could go at regular speed and still be making great time.

I played this game alot in Elementary school and only had a limited amount of time to play before the daily announcements and ------ -- ---------- (Censored by Federal Judges). That was before the days of speed runs :D

Courtroom?

[kmhebert]

OK, I vividly recall that at one point while playing this game, I got into trouble with the law and ended up in a courtroom. I said something snide to the judge and went to jail. Now this was a long time ago, but I have to ask, is this a completely false memory or did something like this happen in The Oregon Trail or some other similar Apple II game?

don't do it!

[Flunitrazepam]

no don't! for god sake think of the virtual buffalo!

The history behind bison killings

[Allen Varney]

Unfortunately, in real life it was all too easy to kill a buffalo with a rifle. In later decades hunters would kill vast numbers of buffalos and take only the tongues. So I wanted kids to feel a sense of shame for killing too much and then wasting the kill.

I swear I'm not trolling here, but I think the designer could more instructively have discussed the actual historical reasons hunters killed bison:

Hunters were paid by large railroad concerns to destroy entire herds for several reasons:

• The herds formed the basis of the economies of local Plains tribes of Native Americans.
• Herds of these large animals on tracks could damage locomotives when the trains failed to stop in time.
• Herds often took shelter in the artificial cuts formed by the grade of the track winding though hills and mountains in harsh winter conditions. This could hold up a train for days.

Besides this, Bison skins were valuable for industry, clothing such as robes, and rugs. Old West Bison hunting was very often a big commercial enterprise, involving organized teams of one or two professional hunters, skinners, cartridge reloaders, cooks, wranglers, blacksmiths, security guards, teamsters and large numbers of horse and wagons. Some of these professional hunters such as "Buffalo Bill" Cody killed over a hundred animals at a single stand and many thousands in their career. A good hide could bring $3.00 in Dodge City, and a very good one $50.00 in an era when a laborer would be lucky to make a dollar a day.
Proposals to protect the Bison were discouraged, as it was recognized that the Plains Indians, often at war with the United States, depended on Bison for their way of life. General Phillip Sheridan spoke to the Texas Legislature against a proposal to outlaw commercial Bison hunting for that reason, and President Grant also "pocket vetoed" a similar Federal bill to protect the dwindling Bison herds. By 1884 the American Bison was close to extinction.

I suggest this kind of history is valid for inclusion in a historical game about the Oregon Trail.