The Oregon Trail is one of the oldest games ever created and has had the staying power to keep being released up to a few years ago. The game series is largely remembered today for being an excellent source of memes, especially for ones about dying of a certain disease.

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Despite being one of the most talked-about games in history, a lot of new gamers have never played it, and even those who did play it don't know too much about it. So, we've compiled a list of things that you should know but probably didn't about this educational classic.

10 First Release

The original version of The Oregon Trail was released in 1971 and was developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. The original version was completely text-based with no visuals at all. In 1975, the game started to be produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC).

The game was developed as a tool to teach children about the struggles that early 19th century pioneers had to face. Little did the developers know about the legacy they were creating.

9 Origins

The idea for the game started when one of the developers Don Rawitsch, who was a history major in university, was working a job as a student-teacher at a junior high and his superior asked him to create a unit on the westward movement of people in the United States. Instead of just preparing a unit Rawitsch got help from his roommates, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger decided to build a text-based game for the computers that the school was using at the time.

8 Game Development

Just two weeks after the three developers got to work on the text-based version of the game, it was finished. The students loved the game and would line up after school to play the game. When the school year ended, Rawitsch removed the game from the computer and took the source code with him.

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In 1974, Rawitch was hired by MECC, a state-funded educational software company, to rebuild the game for broader use in more schools within the state.

7 Addition Of Graphics

The Oregon Trail became one of MECC's most popular software having thousands of uses from all across Minnesota's schools. In October 1984, MECC brought in programmer R. Philip Bouchard, along with a few others, to make a more visually-appealing version for the Apple II computer that was going to be marketed toward home use rather than the educational program that already existed.

The new development team did not have any of the original developers. The new game was built to be more accurate to life on the Oregon Trail and was to have a lot of replayability.

6 Multiple Versions

The development time of the new version lasted 10 months from October 1984 to the end of July 1985. The new version of the game was finally released in Fall 1985 for the Apple II computer. From 1991 to 1993, MECC continuously updated the game for different platforms.

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In 1991, it was released on Macintosh in monochrome, and in 1992 it was released on DOS and was titled The Oregon Trail Deluxe. Finally, the game was released on Windows in 1993.

5 Handheld Release

A version of The Oregon Trail was actually released in a handheld version not that long ago. The game used a DOS 2.1 version for its graphics and was produced by Basic Fun, a subsidiary of The Bridge Direct.

The game was released in 2018—yes, that recently—and was a Target exclusive at the time. The handheld game later found its way to being available in Wal-Marts and other stores across the United States in 2019. The game was an exact port of the DOS version, but with internally saved high scores.

4 Memes

One of the biggest reasons that the game and it's several different versions and spinoffs have been able to survive and thrive for this long in the gaming landscape is because a lot of people have nostalgic memories of it, and then those same people turn those memories into memes. The Oregon Trail was very ahead of its time in terms of design and replayability, but, sometimes, the game just did you dirty and it would rub it in your face, like with the game's classic manner of death, dysentery.

3 Musical

The game has been so influential in it's nearly half a century-long lifespan that it actually inspired a Broadway-style musical. The musical was title The Trail to Oregon! with its music and lyrics created by Jeff Blim.

The musical was created as a parody of The Oregon Trail video game and had the characters names be chosen by the audience in the beginning by having the audience shout out names, the audience would also choose which characters died at the end of the show.

2 Total Sales

The Oregon Trail is one of the most successful games in all of gaming history. Over its ten versions and a nearly 50-year long lifespan, the series has sold over 65 million copies. The game was found in schools all across the United States in the 80s, 90s, and 00s as a lot of computers shipped bundled with the game.

This means that a ton of people have memories of playing this game at school and maybe even staying after school to play it, a lot of them dying of dysentery along the way... in the game, we mean.

1 Legacy

With so many people have nostalgic memories of dying in different horrible ways on The Oregon Trail, the game has become one of the most talked-about and long-staying games in history. In 2016, Time placed the game 9th on its "The 50 Best Video Games of All Time" list and was featured on in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. It was also put into World Video Game Hall Of Fame as a part of the 2016 class.

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