Ahh, The Oregon Trail

Oh no!

 

Oregon Tail is an example of a game where it can become both educational and entertaining. It can also be an example of what aspects are being used and what is not in a game that make it memorable.

I remember the first time I played Oregon Trail. I was in 1^st grade which was in the late 80s and video games in the classroom was starting to pick up in the classrooms. I know in the 70s they had video games to, but the industry of video games was trying new avenues by incorporation games into schools until the 80s. When we had free time from class, I would go to one of the 5 computers we had in our classroom and play this game. The game was on an Apple 2 so no blast processing for this system. It would have been to rad for it.

Such a beast! I can't believe the cost was $2638 when it first was released!

Anyways, I remember one time me and a friend playing. We both would skip the text dialogue and go straight to the hunting part of the game. We would also try to ride the rapids every time we got to a river and sometime crash it into some riverbed so we can write on the tombstone when someone died. The popular etching on the stone was something along the lines of the commercial Tombstone pizza stating "Here lay’s pepperoni and cheese, his favorite topping" or something similar to that statement.

 Love this commercial!

Now that I’m older, I played the iPad version of the game and surprisingly it hold up. I miss the 8 bit version sure, but the newer version has a better text layout, colorful design, and a variety of choices with decent animations.

I don’t know if kids are playing it as much as I did back in the day, nevertheless with the updated graphics and animations, they are getting more out of the journey than just hunting and purposely killing their wagon mates for kicks.

By the way, hunting in that game is just as amazing.