The Oregon Trail - longplay fullplay - MECC, 1985 - Apple II / PC / DOS / Atari / C64 / Mac

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Platform releases: Apple II, Atari 8-Bit, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, DOS, Mac, Windows, DSiware, J2ME, Windows Phone, Android, iOS, Wii, 3DS.

More about The Oregon Trail (from Wikipedia):

The Oregon Trail is a series of educational computer games. The first game was originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach 8th grade schoolchildren about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.

In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an 8th grade history class as a student teacher. He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on a HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help.

These are the original core gameplay concepts which have endured in every subsequent version: initial supply purchase; occasional food hunting; occasional supply purchase at forts; inventory management of supplies; variable travel speed depending upon conditions; frequent misfortunes; and game over upon death or successfully reaching Oregon.

The game that would be later named The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on December 3, 1971. Although the minicomputer's teletype and paper tape terminals that predate display screens were awkward to children, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to users of the minicomputer time-sharing network owned by Minneapolis Public Schools. When the next semester ended, Rawitsch printed out a copy of the source code and deleted it from the minicomputer.