It's 1847, or maybe 1848, depending on who you ask. You are in Independence, Missouri, and your only job is to get you and everyone you love all the way to Oregon City. That was the beginning of one of the great video games of all time, one of the great educational tools of all time: Oregon Trail from MECC. This is Verge History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today on the show, it's time to travel the Oregon Trail.
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All right, we're back. It's time to talk Oregon Trail. Joining me in the studio, Chris Grant. Hello, sir.
The nerdiest gamer I know, the person with the most gaming consoles that I know.
Uh, it depends on who you know, but that's probably true at the moment.
Also, possessor of a cold, a raspy voice. What are we doing here?
I think it's laryngitis. I can't tell you. It's been like this for a minute.
All right, we're gonna keep a steady stream of tea coming into the studio. We'll get through it. Appreciate you being here.
Also here, Philip Bouchard. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
You are not only a person we've brought in here to talk about this game, but you are a part of the story of Oregon Trail. We're going to get into it a lot, but just very quickly up top, give us a sense of your role in the story of Oregon Trail.
All right. Well, the first generation of the product was already well known, primarily a text game. And in 1984, I was assigned by MECC to lead a team to create a completely reimagined version, the first completely reimagined version of this game. And we spent 10 months on it. It came out at the end of July in '85, and it worked. It succeeded.
It sure did. All right, this is good. Let's get into it. Let's start at the beginning here. I want to rewind back to the early 1970s with three people in Minnesota: Don Rawitsch, Paul Dillenberger, and Bill Heinemann. There are three student teachers working on stuff, and they have this very cool technology story. Like, this is the kind of sort of eureka moment you hear about in tech all the time. And unlike most of them, this one appears to be real, which makes me very happy. So they're in Minnesota, they're teaching, and Don's supervisor asks him to come up with some lesson plans for a story about the American migration. And Don decides, well, you know, rather than like read them out of a textbook, I'm going to make a board game. And the way I understand it, he basically rolls out this giant thing of butcher paper on the floor of their house and starts designing a game. And he puts together a board game and figures out how all the pieces are going to move. He has just this sense that there's a better way to teach kids how to do this than like reading them a book about the Oregon Trail. His roommate, Bill Heinemann, decides, okay, actually, this is a computer game. This is very, very early. I mean, this is like the '70s, Chris. Computer games are like not really a thing at this point.
No, certainly not at home. Yeah.
Certainly not in any way that you would experience in a school setting or a home setting.
Yeah. Yeah, Philip, actually for folks who didn't live in this era of computing, can you describe what it was like to interact with a mainframe computer? Like if you're trying to use a computer in 1971, what are you doing?
Well, one of the most common ways of interacting was with punch cards. So the computation center would be in the huge basement of a building, the whole staff maintaining it. You bring your punch cards in, submit them, and later on these punch cards come back. However, in the case of MECC, most of the interaction was done with a teletype terminal. So you had this big thing that looked like a typewriter on a stand and a big roll of yellow paper, and every interaction, whether you were typing or the computer was typing back to you, would appear on this continuous roll of yellow paper. And then if you wanted to save the program for later, if you couldn't save it on the computer, then you would save it to punch tape.
Right? Neither of those things lend themselves to fun, fast-twitch video games.
So, okay. So they decide that, okay, we're going to make this into a video game. I think they had 10 days to do it before he had to go teach this in class. And Bill Heinemann is like, okay, I can make this for you. And Philip, I have another question for you on this front because there's this great shout-out to the Gaming Historian YouTube channel, which has a terrific video on a lot of the backstory of this game. And there's a bunch of moments in it where Bill Heinemann in particular talks about the idea of Oregon Trail immediately making sense to him as a computer thing, that it is like fundamentally it's about weights and measures and probabilities and algorithms. And Philip, your part of the game doesn't come along for a little bit still, but can you explain what it is about even the original basic idea of Oregon, as this game came to be called, that makes it make sense as a computer game?
Oh yeah. So Bill saw that this was fundamentally a resource management game. So you have certain boxes in which you have quantities of, you have a certain amount of food right now, you have a certain number of bullets, you have a certain number of oxen, and you want to maintain an adequate amount of each of those resources for your entire trip in order to survive. And from a mathematical standpoint, that is the core of the game. And the things that happen along the way influence, cause increases or decreases in these boxes, but the boxes can actually influence one another as well. So that was the concept that he gathered immediately, understood, and implemented in its first rudimentary form.
Yeah. It's kind of a perfect spreadsheet problem in a certain way, right? Like Oregon Trail is to some extent like a very fancy spreadsheet.
And this is the eureka moment you said, right? Like he saw the game on the floor and had it explained to him and said, 'Oh, this is a math problem. Like I can solve this with a computer.' Also, I thought it was funny earlier you said video game. And I think that when we talk about a game like this, like we think of a video game and the mechanics of it feel like a video game, but those early versions were very much not video, right? Like quite literally not.
So yeah, I mean computer game or PC game, but it's this fascinating proto-video game landscape.
Yeah, that's actually a good segue into the thing that they build. Fundamentally, it's a text adventure. It gives you a bunch of information and then asks you to answer a question essentially, and you answer the question in whatever way you want, and then the computer goes off and calculates its thing and then it comes back. They build this game in 10 days. It's ready for the kids to play. They call it Oregon, and they load it onto the mainframe of the school system. Immediately everybody falls in love with it. Like it's one of the things that I think is so interesting and so sort of unusual about Oregon Trail is there is something about it that is both extremely complicated and also kind of immediately understandable, that you just show up, sit down, and start playing, and it grabs you like right away. Do you remember when in time the game starts? Chris, here's your first trivia question about Oregon Trail.
And where are you in America? You're in Independence, Missouri.
The original version set it in 1847, and I moved it one year later to 1848.
There you go. Okay. I'm actually very glad you just said that because I spent a lot of time reading sources that said it was 1848 and reading sources that said it was 1847, and I was like, well, somebody has to be wrong here, but you just changed it. That is very good to know. In my research, the students that they showed it to, one of the students in Minnesota at the time was believed to be Prince.
Which is my favorite strange little nugget there.
An early proponent of Oregon Trail.
Yep.
But so the game itself structurally got a lot of things right at the very beginning. Philip, I want to hear your take on kind of what that early game was, but it was basically, there's so much of it that becomes familiar through the rest of the series, right? You start by picking resources, you have to spend money on the stuff that you're going to take with you. You have different probabilities for how it's going to go depending on what you get. If you spend more money on a wagon, your wagon will go faster, so you'll get there sooner, but you have less money to spend on food, so you'll probably die. Like, it becomes this resource management game right out of the box. And the way that it worked is it was, I believe, Philip, correct me if I'm wrong, it was every two weeks was sort of the mark of the game, right?
That's correct. So, every two weeks it would run through the math formulas again to compute your current quantity of resources in each of those approximately five boxes.
Yeah. And it was basically like it also then tried to figure out sort of where you were geographically. This is not designed to be a silly game about going on the Oregon Trail. It was designed to actually tell you what might happen if you were on the Oregon Trail. So like if you were, you would go a certain distance and then you were in the mountains, and then certain things become more likely once you're in the mountains. And they're building all of this into a pretty unsophisticated computer, but as far as I can tell, a fairly clever, intelligent way of actually getting the game to present the journey in a relatively real scenario, which is just very cool. And I think it's also, as far as I can tell, one of the things people immediately glom onto is like there you get the sense of being part of this thing. As a kid who grew up playing a lot of text adventure games, I was born in 1979, so you know, a solid eight years after they made this, but growing up in the '80s and playing Zork, other games, those games do an incredible job of putting you somewhere and like really giving you the fantasy just like a novel would. And it's an art form that is still upheld today. But I think that the idea that a classroom in the early '70s seeing this for the first time, I think they would immediately be transported.
The funniest part about this very early version of the game is they give it to the kids, the kids play it, the faculty loves it, everybody's playing it before and after school, and after like a few days, they take it off the computer, print out the source code, and all move on with their lives. They're just like, 'This was great. Everybody learned about the Western expansion, and we're finished.' And they all just sort of disappear back into whatever else they were doing until, like you mentioned, Philip, MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, an organization that is actually sneakily important in the history of technology that I knew absolutely nothing about until very recently, brings Don back on and says, 'Hey, let's bring this game back.' Philip, can you explain what MECC was and kind of what it was designed to do in those days?
Yes. MECC was designed to bring computational power to the schools all across Minnesota, across all, you know, from K through college. And so it was founded in '73, and Don joined soon thereafter and brought along the Oregon Trail.
Yeah. And I found an interview with Don where he said that a MECC game had four principles, which I really liked. So I'm going to read them to you. He said, '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.' It's kind of a perfect way to describe what a game like that ought to do. And I especially love, and I think there's a lot of Oregon Trail to be learned from that second principle. Learning couldn't be spread out in patches. It had to be woven throughout the game start to finish. Like I would bet most people who grew up with Oregon Trail did not experience it as an educational game.
Yeah. I think the thing it does so well is that the gameplay itself reinforces. So you die a lot.
And like I think the thing that people remember the most about this game is that it's brutal.
And so even if you forget Independence, Missouri, you'd remember that you die.
And that the, the over and over and over and over again.
Right. And I think as far as education goes, like that lesson itself is, you know, I think to his original thesis, probably better learned through this mechanic than through a textbook.
So Don comes back and recreates the game by literally retyping the source code off of the thing he printed off of the computer when they shut it down the first time. Makes some updates to try and make it even more realistic. Does some research, does some good updates to the algorithms and math systems for how all of this is supposed to work. They patched the game in some funny ways. I guess in the early versions you could type a negative in the money sign to give yourself more money. They updated the hunting. Philip, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the way the hunting part of Oregon Trail works going forward is actually like the most important part of Oregon Trail.
Quite true. It is what many people think about first and what in some ways was the biggest hook to the game. In the original one you could shoot not just at things you were trying to kill to eat, but you were constantly having to shoot at things to defend yourself because you were constantly being attacked by bandits and hostile riders and wild animals. And I moved all of that for the next version where all the shooting was restricted to hunting for food.
Interesting. Probably the right decision. But it was even back in those early versions, the text versions of the game would just very matter-of-factly tell you you died. Like it was truly kind of a brutal game in that sense.
I never knew this mechanic until I did this research. But the original shooting mechanic was you type bang, B-A-N-G, enter.
And if you did it too slow or wrong, yep, you would miss.
And one of the amendments they made to it was to add more words, right? So instead of just bang, it was wham.
I mean because kids got really good at typing B super fast, and I don't know, it gives me like this Typing of the Dead kind of vibe, you know, just like you win by typing well, which is really fun.
That's really good. So Don builds this game, or rather rebuilds and updates this game. They make some of these changes and they ship a game called Oregon. Again, it's Oregon all caps because everything on computers was all caps, to everyone in the Minnesota Educational Network. This is 1975, and it just completely takes off. They wrote a guide for how to play it and how to teach with it and the things to read alongside it. And it became, to be honest, I had struggled to figure out how big a classroom success it became. Like I actually don't have a sense of whether it became sort of a core part of the curriculum in Minnesota. Philip, I don't know if you know this any better than I do. I know the game was a hit and people loved it, but like did teachers and school administrators love it at that time?
Well, that's an interesting question. It seemed to be that people had positive things to say about it. As to how much it was incorporated into the curriculum, I don't really have a good answer, but part of the issue was that in actual practice, you would cycle the kids through the teletype. You'd maybe put two at a time, maybe three. And so the rest of the class is doing something else. In fact, the teletype probably isn't even in that room. But if the kids have all been exposed to it, then you have the opportunity to draw upon that experience and build upon it. And I think that is for me the real essence of Oregon Trail in the classroom, is how do you build upon it after the kids have had that experience.
Yeah, I like that. Although right after this comes a very important change, which is computers actually start to make their way at least a little closer into classrooms. It wasn't like it is now where every kid at a desk has a laptop. But right about this time, we're sort of in the late '70s. This is the kind of first personal computer revolution is beginning. And this is another place where MECC becomes really important. MECC was a big dealer for a little tiny company in the late 1970s called Apple. And Steve Jobs at one point gave a quote that was like the thing that made Apple II was schools buying Apple IIs. And MECC was a big part of that. It started putting computers in schools and in classrooms all around the state and working with other similar organizations around the country, and schools were a huge growth machine for personal computers. So, this is all happening, and around the same time, the magazine Creative Computing reaches out to the Oregon Trail team and says, 'Hey, would you just be interested in letting us print your source code in our magazine?' Which is just an insane thing to think of now. It's just a bunch of source code in a magazine. They said yes, and they in fact did. So, can I show you what it looked like? It's a true delight. This is the Creative Computing magazine from May-June of 1978.
Well, that was certainly a very important point in the history of this game.
Yeah. So, I'll just describe this basically. So, it's a magazine page. It looks like it's the beginning of a sort of feature article spread. It's got a big headline in beautiful font. It's got someone riding on a horse. There's a picture of a snake for some reason. And then it has a kind of an intro to how the game works, and then just 10 pages of computer code.
At the risk of dating myself, you bought this magazine.
Not that exact one. I spent a lot of time, like a really weird amount of time, typing code from magazines into my computer at home in BASIC. And when I started taking computer science courses at a local community college, it was almost doing the exact same thing. I'm just like learning how it worked. And there was a whole period where this is how you would get games on your computer. You would manually type them in, and god forbid you miss or don't close a parenthesis or something.
Sure. But yeah, the idea was exactly what you just said, that you would have the thing open next to you and you would faithfully recreate it on your computer and you would be able to run this game. And if you did it that way, you could run all of Oregon Trail. Philip, you were saying this was an important moment for this game. Tell me why.
Well, up to that time, the only way to experience the Oregon Trail game was to get on MECC's timeshare system. And if you didn't live in Minnesota, that wasn't going to happen. So now that the source code was put out there, it could be adapted for all these personal computers. Normally, you had to make small adaptations for it to work on these other computers, particularly whether there were unique things about each one. And all of a sudden, it became well known all over North America.
Yeah, it's amazing to me frankly that it spread that way, that like just, I guess that's of course that's why you put it in your magazine so that people will do that, otherwise it's a very boring thing to put in a magazine, but it says something about that moment in computing that people were willing to do this and would go and apparently a lot of people did. This was also when the game shifts from being called Oregon to being called Oregon Trail. As far as I can tell, the kids in school who were playing the game mostly called it Oregon Trail, and it eventually just shifted to being officially known as Oregon Trail. It starts to spread. We get to the early '80s, MECC starts to more sort of deliberately give it to schools. You can pay a fee and make unlimited copies of the game and install it on your computers. So, the thing starts to spread. And right around this time, I believe if I have my timeline right, MECC spins off from being part of the state of Minnesota's government to being its own, state-owned still, but it's a corporation, and now the idea is it can go, it can grow, it can do new kinds of things, it can make money. And I believe at this moment one Philip Bouchard becomes very important to the Oregon Trail story, which we're going to get to right after this break. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. So it's now, we're getting to the mid-1980s. Oregon Trail is a sort of burgeoning text adventure phenomenon. And then Philip, you get a pretty, I would assume even at the time, daunting task. Tell me about how you got started making Oregon Trail.
All right. So we're looking at the year 1984. But first, let me fill in what happened from 1980 to 1984. Because in 1980 when MECC started distributing an early Apple II version that was based on this code that came out of the magazine we just discussed, everything that MECC was distributing at that time was created by amateurs in their spare time. There was no such thing as a professional creating these kinds of games. But by 1984, the entire competitive landscape had changed. Now we had professional designers, professional artists, professional programmers, and the products looked so different in '84 than they did in '80. So it was really quite mandatory that we produce something, even though it's still going to be for an Apple II, something that was much more up-to-date, modern in so many ways. But there was a second issue, which was that MECC, which had become extremely successful in the school market, now wanted to be successful in the home market too, and they thought the home market was the best way in. So, prior to my joining MECC, I had already had experience in creating simulation models, resource management, these sorts of things. So, and kind of made sense to put me in charge of this particular product. Also, I had had several years of experience at MECC leading teams, working with both programmers and designers. But I still was pretty amazed by my mandate, which was follow my gut, do whatever I need to do, just make sure I don't lose the magic of the original and stick to the Apple II, you know, even though there are more modern machines out there. Let's do it again for the Apple II. So I was then leading a team of five key people, all of whom played essential roles in the creation of this product and all of whom contributed ideas that made it into the design. But I was the lead designer and I wrote virtually all the documents.
What you just described, you made it sound like a small task, but that seems like a frankly almost impossible task. You have to change the game completely without changing any of what makes the game special and on the exact same hardware on which the game already runs.
I think another part of that context, and this is, you know, this timeline you're talking about 1971 to 1984, when they start, in which the game essentially hadn't changed at all, right? Like the thing you played in 1984 was more or less identical to the game you played in 1971. And that technology curve of like people playing games that were not video games to the competitive landscape, to Philip's point, in 1985 the NES comes out, right? We've already gone through the entire Atari life cycle and crash by then, right? Video games are here. They're in people's homes. Arcades are popular and computer games and computer gaming, there's a lot of other computers also at home. And so the landscape that they're reinventing this game into is so much different than the proto-video game landscape of the original.
Yeah, it's really interesting. And so, Philip, you set out to start this, and I want you to describe the system of cycles that you created.
Certainly. So the original product pointed in a good direction, but I needed to go so much farther down that same road. So a couple of the issues I faced was that designing for the home market, I needed to create something that could be played for 40 hours. But the other thing was for me, I really, really wanted to incorporate geography. And in the original game, the only geography was that it was divided into a flat area and a mountainous area, and that was the extent of any geography in it. In order to do that, I realized I could not use a two-week cycle because the rate of travel depends upon a number of conditions and you don't know where you're going to be after two weeks. So, I couldn't tie the game to geography if I stuck with the two-week cycles. So, I went with a cycle that was based on landmark to landmark. I did a lot of research and figured out what are the principal landmarks that the real travelers on the trail would anticipate. Then connected these and also created some alternative routes. And then with this cycle though, I didn't want the player to just jump from one landmark to the next. I wanted them to feel like they were genuinely traveling on the trail and face issues between landmarks. So that meant I needed another cycle that ran daily. So every day you get an update on the weather, and in this particular model I have instead of just like five boxes of resources, I've got like 15 or so or more, and I got lots of different things being tracked, and everything gets updated on a daily basis, gets displayed on the screen. The travel doesn't stop unless the player says stop here, it just continues automatically or something really serious happens, and then you get to the next landmark. So then day-to-day cycle within the landmark-to-landmark cycle within the region-to-region model which changes the underlying data as you go from region to region. Oh, and of course the weather that's tied to regions but also to the month.
Right? Because this, you could also pick the month that you left, which I remember being like a strangely stressful decision because the game would kind of tell you, it's like if you leave too early, you know, it'll be too hot and you'll all die, but if you leave too late, it'll be too cold and you'll all die.
I think the whole game is stressful. The whole game is wildly stressful. It's like asking them to make these choices that are going to result in people dying. And one of my favorite parts is result in people who have names dying, because you got to name them now. And when I don't know about you, when I play a game, I think of people close to me. I was playing Oregon Trail in preparation for this podcast and I picked my name, my partner's name, my kids' names, and then they start dying and it's like so brutal. But yeah, I think that asking them to make choices that have these consequences is a fascinating part of the game.
I'm curious for both of your perspectives on this moment in terms of the game's complication because again, on the one hand, this game is explicitly designed for kids to play. It's supposed to be educational. It's supposed to teach you things. It's not supposed to be a punishingly difficult puzzle game, right? And obviously, you know, Philip, you're working at this moment with very limited resources in terms of like what the computer can actually do, but also you've got to be thinking, I want to make this game more realistic and more sophisticated, but I don't want it to be so complex that it's impossible to figure out, and it kind of kills this propulsive fun that the game has, even as you're, you know, dying in ever more complicated ways. Was that a thing on your mind of not wanting to make it too much in this turn?
Well, from the beginning, I had a huge number of thoughts as to how do I make this game replayable so that you come back over and over again. Now, keep in mind that there were a lot of games out there where your character dies. You think of Pac-Man, you always die and the goal is to get farther each time, right? So, I wanted players to have to play it three or four times before they succeeded in getting to Oregon. So, it was intentionally somewhat difficult, but not so difficult that you can't learn what you need to learn to succeed. So, each kid that dies then part way along the way comes up with a hypothesis. Well, I wonder why I died. What can I do different next time? And so there's often this effort to keep going, try again, try something else. Try something I haven't tried before. Maybe I should talk to people. And then of course once you get to Oregon and you see that you're on the high score list near the bottom, but you're there and now all of a sudden you have this next thing. Oh, I could do better still.
Is it true that the high scores were mostly made up? This is a conspiracy theory I've seen.
Oh, I just, yeah, I made up the numbers, but most of the names were actual historical names.
Got it. Okay. But it was just you just made a high score list that people weren't on to make them want to play more. It's kind of genius and kind of devious. I love it. Like an unreachable high scoreboard is such a rude thing to do to gamers. I love it.
Philip, you wrote at one point that when you redid the game, your goal was to save five things. And you said it was hunting, the risk of dying, resource management, random events, and purchasing supplies. And I think we've talked about all of these so far except hunting. And I know you did a bunch of work on upgrading hunting for this game, and it is kind of the first live interactive thing about Oregon Trail, right? It's the first thing where you're actually actively moving something around the screen. Was that a big project to get going?
Yes. And part of the issue was that unlike the rest of the game which we could program in BASIC using pre-built subroutines to display text and display graphics, we had to program the entire hunting game in assembly language. So we had to bring in another team member, Roger Shimada, to program that. Although Bob Granon created a real quick prototype in BASIC just to show the movement of the hunter. I worked with Bob and particularly with Don Grin to plan out the character and how the character would move. But we did a lot of experimentation along the way. It was a big question up front was should we do first person or third person? And we went with the third person approach where your character is on the screen and you move it around. And it does take some learning and some agility to figure out how to manipulate all those keys to move the character around because there's no mouse. So you have to use a keyboard to move the character in different directions. Start walking, stop walking, shoot, all the while animals are moving around and there are obstacles in the way that intercept your bullets. So that was a lot of fun to develop, but it also required research because I wanted even that to be educational. So the animals you encounter along the way vary according to where you are. The landscape elements you encounter along the way vary according to where you are. And even the issue about only being able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon was a subtle educational bit of information.
Yeah, it was a very funny thing to encounter playing this version of the game because it really does. It feels like a completely separate game dropped in at intervals to Oregon Trail, which it sounds like technically speaking it basically was. You built another game and just sort of turn it on at the right moments throughout your Oregon Trail experience, which is really, it's kind of what hunting felt like throughout the game, that it's like, I've done math problems, now let's shoot some stuff and then we'll get back to math problems again as a kid. Very fun, like you know, like that was the reward almost for playing some amount of the game. I'm fascinated, Philip, to learn about some of the other mini-games that you guys prototyped and didn't make it in. That was one of the pieces of the history I just had no idea. And you know, you can imagine a world in which the game is a bunch of mini-games, you know, dotted between these simulations that are running, but how did that go about?
Well, in particular I wanted to get two other games in there. I wanted to have, depending upon which route you took on the last 90 miles from The Dalles down to Oregon City, whether you took the Columbia River Valley or the Barlow Road, I wanted to have a game representing each of those two routes. And we eventually got in a very rudimentary version of the Columbia River rafting game, not nearly as big as what we had originally hoped, and the Barlow Road game, which was supposed to be a puzzle game dealing with the real issue of getting over this very difficult route, which required pulleys and ropes and levers and how are you getting your wagon over these steep hills and valleys? That one never made it in. It just ran out of space and ran out of time.
Were those the two limiting factors? I was actually going to ask which of those was a bigger problem? Because if I remember right, you basically did this whole thing in 10 months and on a pretty old even at that point computer, right? Was one or the other of those things the bigger problem or was it really the delightful combination of the two?
It was both. The space on the disk and the space in RAM was extremely limiting. We had 64K of RAM in that computer and part of that space was devoted to the display RAM. Part of it was devoted to the operating system. Part of it was devoted to system...
variables. So we really had a very small amount of space to cram in all these things we needed to have available at any given time in RAM. And then the floppy disk, 140k on each side, including the operating system. There just wasn't much. It was so limited. For instance, I would have loved — when you talk to people at landmarks, there are 48 monologues you can get engaged with — we couldn't put in graphics for those monologues. There was just not space for them.
So space limitation was number one, but also, unlike the other products MECC did at this time, where you try to design everything up front, kind of the waterfall method, I wanted to pursue an approach whereby we're constantly building what's most important at this moment and then prioritizing what's left. And so things were dropping off all along the way. Even by the time we got halfway through it, we had to drop everything else. There were several things I really would have liked to have included that just didn't make it in there.
Did you like keep a list that you're like, when we get to the next rev of this, we're going to really blow it out and do Oregon Trail, right?
I mentioned the Barlow Road game. I really wanted to include bargaining with people that you meet along the way. This would be a real good way to talk to Native Americans because a lot of them were basically involved in entrepreneurship. They come to these different places to trade with people, and there was also trappers and mountain men and soldiers. I wanted to track the health of the oxen. The game kind of implies, you know, bad water and insufficient grass, but then it never actually does anything with that because we didn't build in the oxen health model. There was one that would have been nice, which was what's called the Good Samaritan option, where you encounter people along the way who are in distress and you can help them, and by doing so it doesn't actually help you get to Oregon, but it does give you more points in the end. You are rewarded in the end, you might say.
Yeah, and I really would have liked to have done a more robust Columbia River game, and that's the top of the list. But there were other things too.
Yeah, that's really interesting. And so, but you were given a pretty hard deadline, right? That you were like, you have until whenever it was in 1985 to have this game done, because we are getting it out. Was it as hard and fast as it sounds?
Not completely. See, when we originally started in October, I optimistically said, 'Oh, we'll probably finish by the end of March.'
We finished at the end of July.
So it was October to July, and it was a hard deadline because they had already made a deal to distribute with the first distributor that they were going to get the disk on at the end of July. So that was the real hard deadline, and I appreciate that MECC gave me enough wiggle room that I could continue to make it better up through the end of July.
Chris, I think the history of gaming suggests that three months late is nothing.
Yeah. Like, there is something about this early era of game development where it was a handful of people making software in a room, and then within a generation it got far more complex than that, and just 10, 15 years later... you know, we were talking about before about that timeline from '71 to '85. The next 14 years, right, would be a wildly curved-up complication for gaming.
And I think, you know, audience growth, accessibility, right? These things, this game being in your home — these things all change. I think one of the things I didn't clock or didn't really understand as a kid when I played this is that that hardware restriction of making a game in 1985, limited to the technology of an Apple II, is wild.
And it was a hit still, right? It was still sort of omnipresent, and I don't know if you see a lot of that again.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. The screen itself was also a huge limitation on what we could design. It had a screen resolution of 192 by 280, only six colors, and limitations on what colors of pixels could go side by side. So there's so little we could put on the screen at any given time.
I will say, the art style, going back and replaying it, like, some of that simplicity of it is so iconic, right? It just looks like Oregon Trail. It has such a clear aesthetic. I think the fact that people are still buying T-shirts with the wagon icon on it, like, today — it benefits from that simplicity, which is maybe part of its charm at that time.
