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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."
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.