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History of MECC and Oregon Trail
Gammu writes "For the past thirty years, many children have been raised with a heavy diet of MECC games like Oregon Trail, Odell Lake and Lemonade Stand. These products weren't developed by a major game developer. Rather, they were developed by the state of Minnesota for use in their schools. What began as an initiative to get Minnesota students ready for the micro-computer age turned into a multi-million dollar a year business whose products are still used in US schools even a decade after MECC was sold off to another developer."
Was I the only one dorky enough to receive both the "Number Munchers King" and "Oregon Trail King" awards in front of the entire elementary school at the end of the year?
Man, I miss shooting the hell out of all those bison. The shooting sections of that game really brought out a kill everything that moves mentality. Half the time I wouldn't even need food, but just wanted to shoot things.
Having grown up in Minnesota, I was raised in a grade school that had many copies of the Oregon Trail.
..." or something like that, it said "Indians Attack!" and then you were holding a shotgun from the point of view of the shooter. There were three frames of images with a Native American on horseback and a bow. He would ride at a random speed in front of you and you had to shoot when he was in the middle of the screen. The better you did, the less supplies you lost.
But something that isn't often mentioned about the Oregon Trail is the controversy that surrounded one of the first releases about it. We're all very familiar with the original but before that there was an even older one with crappier graphics. I distinctly remember playing the very old one only to have the teacher come up to my computer, ask me where I got that & then she took the disc and formatted it. Now that was curious behavior for a teacher.
So I came into the lab after school, got another copy of the disk from where I had found the original (stacks of old disks were common) and popped it in. The graphics were worse but I soon realized why this particular version was frowned upon. Instead of saying, "You have encountered Native Americans
I could see how you could argue either way to keep that in the game. Maybe that's really how some Native Americans reacted to settlers. Maybe you don't want your kid thinking that Native Americans were (and still are) like that. One thing is for sure--it was never in another version of the Trail.
Minnesota's history is ingrained with Native Americans. I have many Native American friends and thoroughly enjoy Pow Wows & their amazing celebrations. At the same time, I recognize that there was conflict going on with settlers being killed or wounded at towns like Milford, Acton & Slaughter Slough. Interesting history to me, haven't heard anyone who's known about these events aside from Native Americans.
Is it right to just forget about it? I personally don't think denial is the best way to deal with history. Although, the displacement of Native Americans from the east to parts further west like Oklahoma, Minnesota & Wisconsin (resulting in many deaths) isn't very widely known by most Americans.
My work here is dung.
I think that Oregon Train is single handedly responsible for my addiction to resource management sims.
AQUAMAN has drowned
YOUR MOM has died of dysentery
Good times.
I never heard of the games mentioned in the article. But reading the article, I think it will be wonderful if there are coordinated efforts from the open source community to build more educational games for the kids (I know about edubuntu, and stuff, but I was hoping more like MECC).
-- tinyhack.com
As a native american of the Saskatchewan tribe, let me thank you for your thoughtful post.
And again, in my native tongue:
Oooo booo booo booo booo, oooo booo booo booo booo. Oooo boo oooo booo ooo booo ooo boo boo boo.
With fond memories I remember time spent on kronos and nos playing the mainframe 'oregon trail'. So many failed ventures, so many families lost, so many missed deer and buffalo. I was a poor shot.
And, using up the remaining minutes on xtalk and mmt (wait, was that YIM, AIM, or just texting) typing with people from as far away as luvern and worthington - the far reaches of civilization yet as close as a modem. All that time spent on appleseeds (oops, I suppose now I'm busted). And, of course, 'cheating' (no kidding, that was the accusation) on biology homework with just a brief soliloquy of code. *sigh*
It was all fun until the paper ran out. Thank god for crt's.
So much has changed, so much has stayed the same.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
What about other games like bit-bots math games or.. oh you had a little red hat and you ran around a factory looking for vehicle parts and doing different science related problems to get through doors... forgot the name. Dinosaur Tycoon and a whole bunch of others that they had on the macs and the PCs.
You mad
Anyone know of a link to an online version? Sure I should be working but I want to shot small furry animals!
We had the MECC system in our elementary schools in Mankato, Minnesota. My first exposure to it was around 1977 when I was in 4th grade. All of the MECC terminals we had were paper teletypes, and the original version of Oregon Trail had no graphics whatsoever. Thus, it was just a text adventure. At the beginning of the game, you could change your word for firing your gun. Most people used things like "bang" or "shoot". You had to type the name in fast or you would miss. Longer names were given a bit of extra cushion. Interestingly, the firing text used didn't actually have to be a word.
Soon a few of us stumbled upon a trick: use letters on the keyboard that were able to be quickly typed, but didn't mean anything. One of the class favorites ended up being "wert" or "wertcow". Most of us didn't know how to type at that age, but typing in either of those two words was rather easy for most of us.
There were other cool text-based games on the MECC system, including a sub-hunt game (IIRC, it was called Seawolf), and a dungeon-delving game (IIRC, it was called Scepter). To prevent kids from playing those during school hours, those to games were only accessible before 8am and after 3pm. Oregon Trail, deemed educational, was available during all hours. I remember being one of the geeky elementary kids who actually rushed to school in those days to try to get in some sub-hunting or dungeon-delving before school started. I've been a computer geek every since...
Play Oregon Trail on Virtual Apple 2's emulator. There are other games as well.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is a datapoint for all you young whippersnappers... Back in 1978 when I was a freshman in high school, we had a teletype terminal in a room next to the library that was tied into a GE timesharing system. In addition to Trek and Hunt the Wumpus, one of the games we played was Oregon Trail. Also, I remember playing Lemonade Stand on our schools's Apple II's. Was I playing games commissioned by the state of Minnesota, or did they just steal the ideas?
Self awareness - try it!
The first educational FPS, and RTS. Guns and all. No matter how small the river was, fording it would always kill someone.
Not an MECC game, but still quite educational in my formative years. There's a Java port called Droid Quest.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
If left unchecked, you can expect that these players will have moved onto a Dope Wars adulthood where they borrow money from shady lenders, sell drugs on the street, and shoot at law enforcement, all while holding onto just a slim dream of retiring to the Carribbean as their only possibility for redemption.
I have no relationship/vested interest in the company, but I think this shirt is awesome. It's a great shibboleth for geeks of a certain age.
A couple years ago I got an email from a person trying to get the PET game Trail West to run for his dad (who wrote Trail West) on an emulator and in part of the reply was this message:
If you want to see what Trail West was like, the file is located in this disk image, and is playable on the VICE Emulator. After LOADing but before RUNing, you need to POKE 639,94 in order to circumvent the ancient copy protection. (my bad, should have fixed it)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
...or at least that is what I thought it was called. It was you basic dungeon crawl with The Fantasy Trip (if you are dorky enough to get that reference) like rules. I used to have the source code printed out and the entire rule book. Any body got a copy?
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
that Oregon Trail amongst others is available at WalMart. I have a copy and would be willing to host an iso if necessary.
You know how to look me up, only don't use hotmail, use gmail
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At WalMart, imagine that, huh
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I loved Odell Lake and Odell Woods, and have since gotten a copy of Odell Lake for my Apple II, but alas, no love for Odell Woods. There also seems to be a lack of info on the game online. Is my school the only one who bought it? :(
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Seriously, you all actually played this game? How novel. I myself also spent hours with Oregon Trail, but I'm not sure I ever actually played it. My friends and I got tombstone generation down to a science. Die as fast as possible and etch your brilliantly dirty "Here lies..." rhyme in stone. It was like the nerdiest graffiti you could ever produce.
As a Minnesotan student who grew up in the 80s, I got to play a lot of MECC games on our school's computers. I remember playing the Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number and Word Munchers, and Storybook Weaver.
One thing that I haven't heard mentioned yet, though, is Freedom. I remember this game very well. In it, you played a slave in the south, and the game began with your escape. The game randomly generated a character with different starting statistics each time. Sometimes you would be able to read, sometimes not - in which case all signs appeared as gibberish. Sometimes your character would have a compass or tools, other times you would have to rely on the sun or the growth of moss on trees. The game was presented from a first-person perspective in static screens. The goal, of course, was to make it to the Free North. Over the course of the game, the player met sympathetic people who sheltered them, members of the Underground Railroad, and of course, many people trying to catch and return the escaped slave. It was a very deep and engaging game. The Oregon Trail and Odell Lake were educational, but even on an Apple IIGS Freedom was scary and immersive - I really was afraid when I heard that distorted bark and knew I had dogs on my trail (and no cayenne pepper to throw them off!) Of course now I would probably laugh at the simple graphics and sound, but at the time the game was incredible.
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
I was at Discland and saw a black shirt with pixelated lettering saying "You have died of dysentry".
2 days later I was at work, and a coworker had a blue shirt with an old West font saying "you have died of dysentry."
I never thought an educational game would spawn two different t-shirts with its catchphrase.
Anybody remember Combat on a teletype? 2D real time space combat, over a modem. Having to track your movements and the movements of the other ten people you were in combat with pounding in commands the instant you got a chance waiting waiting to see "**BLAM** you have been hit for 52%" and thinking, "Damn, and that was only the first missle" There was even 'clans', I think there was one called DMS, one of them I think was DMS Pnesssut or something like that. And as long as I am gathering wool with old MNers any AVHS grads here?
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Seeing as how the state created the programs for educational purposes, and not profit, it's a shame that they didn't allow the source code to be available for free. Seems like in the long run, that would have had a larger impact on education. It's even more a shame that they did not open the code once most of the profit had dried up.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
My wife worked at MECC for about five years until Softkey (*spit*) bought and liquidated them. It was a wonderful place to be right up to the end.
Little known fact about OT: if you started on the exact day, followed the exact path and stayed on a specific schedule (resting, waiting, etc) when you got to the Donner Pass you'd die in a snowstorm just like they did. The people working on the project (and all of the historical ones really) were adamant that historical details be correct, so someone embedded this and it stayed though many versions. (I do not recall the details, but I'm sure there are people out there who could produce the specifics.)
Cris E
St Paul, MN
I'm glad someone wrote this article. That was one of the most memorable screens in my computer life, the big MECC with the green grass logo or whatever it was. I remember seeing Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium somewhere on the screen. Oh the memories, Oregon Trail and all the Muncher's games (word muncher? number muncher, etc)
Jimmy was bit by a snake. Hold on Jimmy, i'll go shoot 44 buffalo and that one bear that moves at cheetah-like speeds and there should be a cure in there. I hope so, because i didn't buy anything except for bullets when we were packing for this cross country trip. a little off topic, but still something i played on an older apple product: does anyone remember the "make your own storybook" game? i'm fairly certain i always added a ravine surrounded by bears and wolves for a surprise ending to my stories.
oh marmalade.
I don't know the word MECC, and not being an American, the term Oregon Trail means nothing to me beyond being a trail in or to Oregon. There is a camping store in my city called Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC). So having flash-skimmed the summary, I was left wondering why the second C in MEC and what does it have to do with a camping outfitting store on a trail in Oregon.
/me hands in his geek card.
Sigh!...
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05132003
Seriously, this is hilarious...
Has anyone seen Thule's version of this? http://www.thuleroadtrip.com/
By the time I was in grade school, we were playing Oregon trail on the Mac Classic at school. My parents bought a copy for our Mac Classic home, too. Reading the manual revealed the default administrative password for the game: "boom" (a reference to the older versions of the game).
Of course, the copies of the game at school used the same default password. You couldn't do much; the most exciting thing you could do was increase the frequency of animals, and bump the hunting session time from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
And so I learned the first lesson of security, at age 10: don't leave default passwords unchanged. And of course, the corollary: if you want to gain unauthorized access to something, try the default password first.
kde-edu seems incomplete without a remake of this, Number Munchers, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
That was probably one of the most important things that led to my love of programing, when I saw it on a PET computer back in the late 70's as a child. It blew my mind, particularly the concept of simulations (as opposed to munching dots or zapping aliens), and later when I finally scored the only computer cheap enough (a sinclair) I wrote my own simple version.
Unfortunately today I just program boring business applications for the mortgage industry and websites... but I remember those days fondly. I wish there was something equivalent today for my kids to be inspired by, but I dont know what it is...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
MECC explained on Wikipedia
The first Apple version of Oregon Trail was a very straighforward transfer of the previous text-only version, which existed long before the PET computer. The user interface was tinkered with a little, such as by showing deer to shoot at instead of only saying there was a deer.
There's no need to buy food in Oregon Trail. All you need is enough bullets to send the bison the way of the dodo. As for clothes, I only bought enough to "donate" to the pathfinder/shaman/native at the Snake River Crossing. I believe it was 2 sets of clothing.
Another game that I played at the time (which was 1st - 3rd grade if I recall correctly) was Conan. Man, that game was hard. I never passed the 4th level.
Every geek has some sort of website, programming or computer project. Here's mine: www.youtasteit.com . What's yours?
And now, thanks to the Irish company, Riverdeep, most American educational software companies are either closed or stagnant, no longer producing anything worthwhile.
I'n'it great?
No really, I'll have to hook you up on an ISO or some screenshots or something, stay tuned
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A little tidbit about Apple Computer and MECC history merging together happened in the Summer of 1977. Steve Jobs was then still a pauper and desperate for trying to sell his crazy idea of a personal computer, and was seeking to intentionally market the Apple ][ to the educational market. By an off chance, he heard about an educational computing conference being held at Utah State University, and decided to show up with a couple of demo models with dreams of orders coming from the conference.... or at least gaining a foothold in the then non-existant market of educational personal computers.
In attendance at this conference were some representatives from MECC, who were busy gathering information that would be used by the school districts in Minnesota. By Minnesota state law at the time, no school district could purchase computer equipment unless it had been explicitly authorized by MECC.
Notable enough was that Steve Jobs had impressed the MECC staff sufficiently that they returned home to Minneapolis and changed the computer purchasing orders for the entire state of Minnesota to include the Apple II and Commodore PET as "authorized" purchases... with a strong recommendation to purchase the Apple computers. All told, several hundred Apple computers were purchased by the Minnesota school districts at a very critical time in the history of Apple Computer, and Minnesota began their movement from their central timeshare system to having nearly everything on PCs (and the demise of the MECC timeshare computer).
My own experience more directly in this incident was at Austin High School (Austin, MN) where the high school had a fairly well established Computer Science program (quite popular among the students), and the primary computer system in use for instruction simply crashed cold and hard with no way to repair it. BTW, that was a Wang minicomputer with a whole 32K of RAM shared between 4 terminals. Faced with the possibility of having to cancel the class and re-arrange the schedules of nearly 300 students, the Austin School District decided to check with MECC and see what was available for a replacement. Fresh from the trip to Utah, MECC recommended that they check out the Apple computers from Cupertino, and immediately ordered the computers. BTW, the serial numbers on those computers had only 3 digits when they arrived. I didn't even notice that until 4 years later right before I graduated from H.S., and well after Apple computer was well established and acknowledged as an industry leader.
I must admit being an intern at the MECC offices (then TLC) was great while I was in college. Though By the second summer I could see that though the people were great it wasn't going to be around for long. That fall they closed the offices.
It was great getting a chance before I graduated to see commercial software developed, instead of just my school projects. Placing smackers videos in Oregon Trail Three, working on the installer for another program, working on rafting maps, seeing how much work it would be to resurrect a program from the archive, modifying installers with pig, working on putting a bunch of their products onto DVD via Young Minds master system with a DLT, and the people.
Everyone I worked with was great. Someone had a stack of punch cards sitting on top of their filing cabinet that when I asked turned out to be their masters degree thesis (or it might have been doctorate). On that same cabinet was a great picture I've always remembered. There was an intact house sitting upside down on a tree. One day I either asked or over heard the story. It was his in-laws house. They had gone swimming somewhere and when they came back their house was gone. It is upside down in the neighbors tree. Watching the geese and goslings grow up over the summer in the pound. Realizing how much of a hopeless mess geese make. Plastic duck race in the foutain. The lead programmer who talked about the first time she had played Oregon Trail on a teletype and now was leading development on game.
I was very sorry when I heard they were closing the office, and was sorry I had to mark it off my list of places to apply for work after graduation.
I seem to recall playing a game called Slave Escape that was very similar to the gameplay of Oregon Trail. You'd roll up a character (with a 1/10 chance of being literate; most of the time you couldn't read, and all the signs would be mapped to random characters).
You would set out to escape to Canada and freedom. Along the way, you would follow the underground railroad as best as you could. You had to learn things like on what side of a tree moss grew (or be fortunate enough to get a compass), you could use pepper to avoid trailing dogs, and you had to navigate some speaking situations. If you succeeded, you became a free person.
I know I played it as much as I played Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand, but I still haven't been able to find a description of this game or a hint as to where I could get a ROM to relive the experience (the keywords I can think of tend to lead me to black history websites, since the game was fairly historically accurate).
--
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They, of course, fixed that in later versions.
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