Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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
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