How You Wound Up Playing ‘The Oregon Trail’ in Computer Class (2016) | Hacker News Reader

How You Wound Up Playing ‘The Oregon Trail’ in Computer Class (2016)

smithsonianmag.com

147 pointsNotSwift97 comments

Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego were basically my holy trinity of educational games. The other educational game I remember, which was probably far more important than the three of these put together was some random typing game. I had a keyboarding speed of around 80wpm before I hit high school from playing that one.

BTW, you can still play them here:

* https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990

* https://archive.org/details/msdos_Lemonade_Stand_1999

* https://classicreload.com/where-in-the-world-is-carmen-sandi...

Civilization. Nothing taught me more history, hands down.

Bunch of leaders to read about, bunch of civs, techs, cities, wonders.

Not to mention the tradeoffs of different government types.

A lot of the differences between _____ types in this game were based on the opinions of the authors.

The difference between zero and history-with-bias is more important than the difference to neutral-bias, which a kid probably wouldn't be equipped to unpack the nuance of anyway.

I once tried to make a socialist paradise in SimCity, but the game moved all my town's people out due to high taxes.

There was recently a story here about sim city that discussed some of these limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27593081. If you search for sim city on HN you’ll find several more. In addition to emergent functionality that we don’t foresee when we create a program there’s this other side of impossible functionality that we also embed in the design that we sometimes don’t realize.

Are there any real-life approximations of this situation?

Honestly, just the idea that there are tradeoffs is a lesson worth teaching. That's a lesson plenty of people haven't learned.

In Civilization, implementing Democracy reduces governmental corruption in all cities by 100%. It will more than double your GDP unless you were already a Republic.

It is not possible to be competitive in research production unless you are a Republic or a Democracy, which is an interesting interpretation of classical history.

I recently translated the original 1971 Oregon Trail BASIC source code into Ink (https://unfold.studio/stories/10782/). It was my first time working with GOTO statements and hopefully my last.

The game that taught me typing was trying to respond quickly to trolls in WoW

IRC

My typing speed tripled.

Carmen San Diego was just so good

How about Number Munchers?

Number Munchers was the SHIIIIT! Thanks for the flashback!

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing? I remember an Amiga version which had a mode where had a crude visualization of racing other cars as you typed.

We had to do weekly sessions in Mavis all the way through middle school. I checked a couple years ago and they were still around.

That was the one for me, PC AT version but it had the racing game as well.

Tied with Turbo Pascal for best lifetime payoff on an EXE running on that computer.

Commander Keen has to get the ribbon for hours spent, though, unless it was Empire (hat tip to Walter Bright!)

I played the very old SimCity

The Learning Company stuff absolutely boosted my vocabulary (and ability to solve word puzzles).

Treasure Mountain - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTrNVwAKtLk

Treasure Cove - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jF5s9_GFQPI

And a few more random memories:

The Incredible Machine - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbSMKGQ_rU

Pirates! Gold - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BRS331lGc0

Battle Bugs - I guess what would now be RTS? But with a lot of tactical / positioning elements. So really typical 90s "trying to figure this new type of game out" - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HKGHlL5jySU&t=8m17s

Ancient empires was my favourite of the learning company titles. Had a soundtrack of chiptune classic songs including a gnossiene by Erik Satie that I first encountered in this educational dos game

You can play these in your browser now, although there's no guarantee how well they will work. Leave a review! The emulator settings can be tweaked individually for these, and the emulator software itself is getting updated all the time, so it helps the admins and devs know what to focus on.

Treasure Mountain https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Treasure_Mou...

Treasure Cove https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Treasure_Cov...

The Incredible Machine https://archive.org/details/the_incredible_machine_1992

Pirates! Gold https://archive.org/details/msdos_Pirates_Gold_1993

Battle Bugs https://archive.org/details/msdos_Battle_Bugs_1994

Zoombinis was set theory for kids

There was also Solomon's Key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon%27s_Key.

Breaking down problems and solving real time puzzles was educational in its own way.

Oh God, that game. Ugh, the music of the NES version is permanently seared into my mind.

if you prefer the macintosh version: https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/mecc/oregon-trail.html

From the article:

Forty-five years after Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger sat down and created the original game in two weeks, The Oregon Trail is still a cultural landmark for any school kid who came of age in the 1980s or after. Even now, there remains a constant pressure to revive the series, so that nostalgic Gen Xers and Millennials can amble westward with a dysentery-riddled party once again.

...well, I've got a nice Apple computer setup and ready to entertain and educate some young people in my life. They like the machine. These programs still work as intended.

For me, it's surreal to hear those sounds, see those sights and watch them process the experiences. Recommended, if you've got a little space and time. Doing this kind of thing is going to get increasingly expensive from here though.

Interestingly, one 5 year old has already noted the CRT. "Papa, I want to play some games on that TV."

Of course! Might as well let her experience the CRT. I think they are cool. Many of us do, and it's going to be an increasingly rare treat. Why not?

Do you have any recommendations for a game for children who cannot yet read? My 3yo loves Putt Putt (we play the Steam version) because the car talks to him. But in the early 80s computers did not yet have speech synthesis or enough storage for audio. I would love for him to enjoy Oregon Trail some day, but I don't think he's ready for it. Did MECC make any games targeted at younger children?

This might be overkill, but here's a MECC catalog for 1984-5. https://archive.org/details/MECCEducationalComputingCatalog8...

There is a Peppa Pig game for consoles and Windows coming out on Oct. 22nd. If it ends up being good, that might be the first game I try to play with my 3-year-old.

I do not, but will look. I will say, back in the 80's someone asked me that and owned an Atari 800 XL and so did I.

I took a weekend and made this big BASIC program that did something cool for everything they did. Press one key and a smile face. Press another, and the colors change, etc... And some were random, like a set of lines drawn differently each time, or a big smile and a little one.

The little guy loved it. Would press the keys, watch, and repeat.

Later I found his Dad sitting with him, saying the letter of each key while responding to the action.

I did not introduce old computing, until the one I am raising got some basic skill. She is doing letters, numbers and can use a joystick. She asked.

Surprisingly, she loves to play Drol! Weird, but pretty game. It has clear, cute graphics and so there you go. She is 5, and became aware enough to play with me later in her 4th year.

Before that, I loved watching her play touch games on an iPad. Sadly, I do not have it handy and can't remember the name, but it has shapes one can drag into matching color holes. Anything like that works at 3.

At 4, I also did ABC Mouse and she loves it. Bought a year. She will ask for mouse and do it for a few hours at a time. I may buy another.

I was going to wait on the Apple, but she saw me using it and asked. (I am making a retro assembly language game and doing some electronics with that old computer for fun)

I brought up a few games on the Total Replay and she seems to really like that computer. It was unexpected. So, I decided to get some MECC stuff setup and will probably have her write programs as soon as she can handle it.

Another friend grew up with the Color Computer and has kids a few years older and expressed interest when I shared these experiences. I have a nice one all setup, and it is going to their house to see if the same thing happens. I will just not have the time for it. I want to, because sweet 6809... maybe his kids will jam on that machine and love it more than the box it is in does.

We think some young people will get that spark same as we did, so why not give them a go on the old machines when it's fun?

I remember being 2 years old and first banging my head against a VCR. I really wanted to get Toy Story working again.

Even if they can't read, a lot of educational games w/ reading can still be interesting. The bright lights and colors encourage exploration and discovery, and when you figure out what the game is trying to say (even if you only know a couple words) it's an epiphany.

Just let them play around in Putt-Putt without your supervision. Or Spy Fox / Lemonade Stand. Zoo Tycoon is also a really good one. They all require reading, but a kid can just bang themselves against it and learn on their own. (If you leave the room).

If we're sticking with nostalgiaware, these were hands down my favorite games when I was a toddler.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/fisher-price-little-peopl... https://www.myabandonware.com/game/fisher-price-school-bus-d...

I don't think Pajama Sam requires reading, I definitely played it before I could read at least, and probably around the same age as when I was playing putt putt.

One of the follow-ups, The Yukon Trail, was a brutal lesson in knowing who you can trust. For example, there's a proverbial shell game, where you discover on your own the game is rigged once you start placing higher bets. Or the partner option who was no skills, but lots of money - inevitably ends up getting you killed.

As much as I enjoyed those MECC games, I am much more appreciative of how they helped to get computers into schools. With computers being found in everything from computer labs to regular classrooms, it was usually possible to find a teacher who would let me in at lunch or after school to explore programming.

Growing up in the UK, I hadn't even heard of Oregon. But we had more culturally relevant games to play. In my school we played Drug Wars...

on BBS?

Could also be the version that ran on the TI graphing calculators.

My 1st exposure to programming =) (Also snake, lunar lander, and the ASM games the cable guy had!)

In the mid 2000s, there were also J2ME/JAR versions of Drug Wars that students would install on their feature phones.

I work in educational software, in Minnesota, and have actually worked with a number of former MECC employees over the years. They have some fascinating stories. It's a small world. Currently our head of DevOPs actually worked on Oregon Trail, though a later version.

As a kid growing up in the 90s we did play alot of Carmen sandiego, Oregon trail, number munchers and math blaster. On mac there was also kid pix. And there was a game where you dropped a stick figure from a helicopter into a horse drawn cart (stunt copter)

> All MECC games had to do four things, says Rawitsch. First, the information based on real events had to be historically accurate. Second, learning couldn't be spread out in patches; it had to be woven throughout the game start to finish. Third, it had to include thorough documentation for the teachers to use it as a teaching aid. And fourth, the games had to be fun.

I wonder how many games today could check all four of these boxes?

Assassin's Creed comes to mind.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/18/new-tool-in-history-c...

I see that you're talking about the Discovery mode in some of the recent games, where you don't interact with the plot at all, but can wander around and look at all the models. That's very cool!

To be clear though, those games are in general not historically accurate. I mean, about the only thing they got right about Pope Alexander VI is that he had an alien mind control staff and he was involved in a battle with cloned assassins inside the Vatican. But other than that, there were a numerous historical inaccuracies...

Anybody else who grew up playing Carmen San Diego now into GeoGuessr? It'd be extra cool if there were an annotated (perhaps AI-driven?) version of GeoGuessr that provided clues along the way, like "the Cyrillic alphabet is used in these countries", "the giant baobab tree is only found in Madagascar", "tiny kei cars are usually in Japan", etc.

I recall GeoSafari...is that similar?

What really stands out in my memory is the Carmen Sandiego show on PBS with the in-house acapella band.

Not quite - GeoGuessr is an online game that drops you somewhere randomly in the world using Google Street View imagery. Then you can navigate around, and based on what you see, try to guess where in the world you are. More and more of it has moved behind a paid subscription, but I believe you can still do their Daily Challenge with a free account if you want to check it out.

https://www.geoguessr.com

GeoGuessr is fun. It's amazing how good some people are at that game.

One weekend I was having trouble sleeping, so decided to check out what was streaming on twitch. A group of chess streamers I follow was attempting to get a perfect run of 100 in a row. I caught the last couple hours of what was a continuous 48 hour attempt, and it honestly was one of the most entertaining things I've ever watched.

Does Gen Z have its own "The Oregon Trail" game in the cultural sense?

Minecraft!

I don't think it's possible for a game to fill the same cultural niche now as when games were a relative novelty.

Maybe something like Minecraft or Roblox?

In terms of educational software, it's doubtful. I was teaching in an elementary computer classroom around 2010 and my recollection of the software landscape is of remakes of 1980's software, some uninspired (though otherwise good) software designed for secondary students, and utter garbage that didn't deserve the designation edutainment. The stuff I am describing as garbage was pretty much a game with interludes of learning, which is contrary to what MECC set out to do. While that model may be fine for parents buying a game for their own children, it isn't very useful in schools.

Minecraft probably, just based on all the very popular young livestreamers that grew from that.

Wow, Number Munchers and Oregon Trail, spot on. Tack on Mavis Beacon 5, Carmen San Diego and Jump Start and we're home.

For more about the game and its contribution to computer games, I highly recommend Jimmy Maher’s excellent blog: https://www.filfre.net/2011/03/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-tr...

Another excellent resource is this presentation from GDC 2017 from one of the Oregon Trail creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdGNFhKhoKY

It's interesting that I never played this game or heard of it until I was older and had limited time for games. Part of its appeal to the American audience will definitely be the historical setting that y'all learn about in class, which has great significance to you.

You know, I don't think the history made it popular. You could have put in any historical event so long as it was sometimes funny and an adventure. The real point was that you got to stop doing boring stuff in class and play games for a bit. For me, at least - as a child in the mid-to-late 80's, these were kind of a novelty. At some point, we had an NES at home - but this didn't take away from the novelty.

It was the same with, say, Carmen and her world adventures.

Nah, it's appeal was it was just a really good game (for the time). I played Oregon Trail the game before I ever knew what the real Oregon Trail was nor did I even know of a place called Oregon. I thought that the game was entirely fictional at the time.

Sry for a weird question, the "wound up playing" in the title, since I am not native, I can't understand the real meaning, I googled but seems no good answer, so whats the real meaning in this context?

It is the same as "how you ended up playing"

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/wind-up-or-end-up.14...

Is there a good inventory / overview of all the educational games from that era?

I played a bunch of different games in 1989/1990 that I only vaguely remember today .. would be wild to see them again just for the nostalgia trip.

Our favorite on the C64 in Finland was a game where you flew a helicopter on a world map and had to find different countries by name. Not sure what the name of that game is.

Hahaha, I was just playing that game a couple months ago for the first time. It was pretty fun tbh. It's somewhere on Gamebase. Maybe in these results.

http://www.gamebase64.com/search.php?d=45&h=1&adv_game_name_...

Thanks for the link, it's this one: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=14318&d=45&h=0

Less thorough, but maybe more nostalgia, you can load a bunch of these and play them in your browser now. https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary

https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/educational/ might be a good start

Back in middle school (1998 - 2002), we learned about geology through this oil exploration game. It was pretty fun even though we had to play it on a 5" floppy using a computer from the 80's that somehow still worked. I wonder if anybody else played this game, and if so, do you remember what it was called?

In case C64 or a multi-system publisher: Was it any of these?

http://www.gamebase64.com/search.php?f=0&t=2&s=Oil&b=Go%21&d...

I believe that it was an Apple computer. Also, it didn't have a colored screen, it was completely green. Thanks for the link though, I may do some sleuthing.

Did anyone else play the Voyage of the Mimi games? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/089443938500300...

Does anyone else remember an educational game that was based in the world of Alice in Wonderland?

I think was terminal or DOS and had like math and English problems with like the Cheshire Cat and such.

It was from around the time of The Oregon Trail and Kid Pix, most likely before?

Too bad the game did not include the state name’s pronunciation, which is regularly mangled from the mid-west to east coast.

https://www.wikihow.com/Pronounce-Oregon

It wasn't until flying into Seattle that this east coaster learned of oreGONN. Which is surprising because I'd always pronounce the game title that way. In any other context I'd say oreg'n. In general east coasters lean on the 'schwa' much more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa

It's like how Nevada residents _insist_ on the incorrect pronunciation of the name of their state[1]. I go with the "when in Rome..." philosophy -- I say it wrong when I'm there, too.

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/618644/youre-probably-pr...

It is correct because it is codified. The State of Nevada once had a very detailed web page explaining why the hard A is correct. In some state documents, you will even see it written Nevāda. (iOS doesn't seem to have the proper glyph.)

Meanwhile, both Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and Los Angeles, California each have four correct pronunciations.

(I prefer the "Los Angeleez" variation because that is what I first heard on KHJ.)

The Oregon Trail reboot is already on Apple Arcade. I still prefer the original.

This brings back the memories. The Oregon trail game is how I even learned what dysentery was! The other game I loved as a kid in school was number munchers. That was my jam.

I enjoyed the game Taipan a lot more, personally. It tought me to buy opium in batavia and sell it in hong kong for huge profits.

If you want the nostalgia you can find all the music (and gameplay) on youtube for nearly every version.

Oregon Trail was my first FPS. My friends and I always tried to hunt as much as possible.

It was overhead right? Not FPS? I may be remembering wrong.

The hunting parts were FPS. At least on the MS-DOS version.

The hunting part was FPS

It wasn’t sideview or quite a 3/4 view. There were (much) later versions that were FPS.

You are correct, the original version was a little overhead 2D arcade game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7DQrOa70yk#t=2m38s

Other revisions of the game were point and click style, closer to a FPS

Granny’s Garden. Anyone?

Yes, I think it was ubiquitous in the UK and have assumed that Oregon Trail was similarly positioned culturally - though of course GG had no external factual basis to it (that I recall).

Did you play L-Adventure too?

(They're both available online IIRC).

Yes! I was about to post about this. One of my earliest game memories at school.

Number Munchers was my favorite MECC game.

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