If you were a teacher walking the hallways of Bryant Junior High School in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, in the winter of 1971, you might have found it odd that students were congregating
just outside of a janitor’s closet. Were the kids canoodling? Smoking the devil’s lettuce?
What you probably wouldn’t have guessed was that the teenagers were lining up to play a
text-based computer adventure game about the westward movement of the 19th century
that involved hauling food and watching your loved ones die of pneumonia. It’s the game
that went on to transform classrooms, popularize Apple, and nearly sent Barbie to the frontier to
suffer doll dysentery. It’s the story of The Oregon Trail, and it’s next on Throwback.
Welcome back to the series where we take a deep dive into some of the most fascinating pop culture
stories and events you might remember from your childhood. I’m your host, Erin McCarthy, and I,
too, was once a virtual settler embarking on a dangerous 2000-mile journey from Independence,
Missouri to the promise of a better life in Willamette Valley, Oregon. I forded rivers,
took aim at deer and rabbits—those freaking bunnies were so fast, and I don’t think
I ever hit a single one—checked out virtual versions of iconic landmarks like Chimney Rock,
tended to the sick, and wrote my own name on a tombstone when I finally succumbed
to a germ I hadn’t even known existed. It was all part of life on The Oregon Trail,
perhaps the most successful educational computer game of all time. In the 1970s,
1980s, and part of the 1990s, kids across the country learned about this
pioneering part of American history in computer class,
typing in commands and hoping they had enough food to feed their party. It was a lesson in history,
economics, and pure survival—not only for players, but for the game’s creators, too.
I hadn’t heard of Don Rawitsch until we started researching this video, but it turns out he
helped shape my childhood. In the early 1970s, Rawitsch was a cool teacher, an educator who
wanted to make classrooms fun and engaging. While he was a 21-year-old student himself at
Carleton College in Minnesota, Rawitsch was also teaching an eighth grade high school history class
in north Minneapolis. He sometimes dressed up as historical figures, including Meriwether Lewis,
and encouraged kids to take an active interest in history.
In the fall of 1971, Rawitsch decided he wanted to teach his lesson on westward expansion a little
differently. He started to work on a board game in which players could follow a map of the Oregon
Trail. In the 1800s, thousands of pioneers had traveled westward in covered wagons, covering 10
to 20 miles a day on a six-month trip. Rawitsch wanted to communicate to his students just how
harrowing this journey was, and how everything from bad weather to disease could prove fatal.
While Rawitsch was working on the board game, he started discussing it with his two roommates,
Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger. Both were aspiring teachers who also attended
Carleton College and taught math at schools in south Minneapolis. The difference was that
they knew how to do some computer programming. They suggested to Rawitsch that The Oregon Trail
would make a perfect text-based computer game. Rawitsch was intrigued, but there was a problem.
His lesson was set to begin in just two weeks. That was enough time to work up a board game,
but would it be enough time to program an entire computer game? Heinemann and
Dillenberger assured him they could do it. If that sounds impossible, try to take into
consideration the state of computing at the time. If schools had a computer at all,
it was a giant mainframe that dominated a room. Students would use a teletype machine,
which was essentially a typewriter connected to a phone line, to type commands. There was no screen,
and no graphics. While writing the game’s 800 lines of code took up a lot of time,
Heinemann and Dillenberger didn’t have to worry about a complex user interface. At the end of
the two weeks, they had the game loaded and ready to go. In fact, the two of them gave it
a test run at Bryant Junior High School, which is where the students stood waiting their turn
to play at the teletype machine in the converted janitor’s closet. Sorry, “the computer room.”
The initial response was promising, but how would Rawitsch’s own class respond to it? And how would
this simple text-based adventure game somehow find itself in school computers across the country?
Don Rawitsch wheeled his school’s teletype machine into his history class on December 3,
1971 with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. He explained to his students
that he had a game for them called The Oregon Trail, and that they would be separated into
groups to play. While this allowed students to be engaged, it was also a practical matter.
The school only had one teletype machine. Students quickly developed a simple division
of labor. They would pick the group member they felt was the best typist and sit that person in
front of the teletype to input commands and receive responses from the program,
which was loaded in the mainframe computer. Another student would be in charge of the budget,
keeping track of money spent on supplies like food and clothing. And another would follow the
map provided by Rawitsch that gave them a visual reference for the trail and its landmarks.
The teletype would spit out questions on printer paper, which operated at a speed of 10 characters
per second. Originally, the game just gave you some money and then let you loose on the trail—the
classic difficulty levels of banker and two other professions that no one ever played as were
added later. The game would ask questions like: How much do you want to spend on your oxen team?
Do you want to eat poorly, moderately, or well? Bad illness—medicine used.
Do you want to hunt or continue? Answers were typed in numerically. The program
would then inform players of their progress. A hallmark of The Oregon Trail is that life in the
game was horrible, and that anything from disease to starvation could result in your dramatic and
untimely demise (the threat of drowning while fording a river wouldn’t arise until later
iterations of the game). To survive, you’d have to hope you spent wisely on food and were a good shot
when aiming at deer. That’s because despite being a primitive technology, the teletype could still
gauge how quickly a player could shoot down their dinner. To fire a weapon, players typed BANG,
and the computer measured how accurately and how quickly they typed it. If someone’s finger
slipped and your team accidentally typed BONG, your party might starve to death.
Anybody who’s played The Oregon Trail—and that’s most kids who grew up in the 1980s
and ‘90s—remembers that the game offered more gruesome ways to die than a Friday the 13th movie.
But was the real Oregon Trail that dangerous? In a word, yes. And actually, maybe worse.
In 2019, The San Francisco Gate interviewed Lee Kreutzer, an expert on the actual Oregon Trail,
to find out how obstacles in the game stacked up to the problems faced by settlers.
Kreutzer addressed that most popular of Oregon Trail deaths, dysentery. For those blissfully
unfamiliar, dysentery is usually a bacterial infection in the intestines that results in severe
diarrhea and dehydration. Left untreated, it can be fatal. While people did contract dysentery,
the leading cause of death on the Oregon Trail was probably cholera, another infection that
also causes gastrointestinal distress. Cholera was contracted by settlers drinking contaminated water
from bacteria-infested rivers and streams. Settlers rarely boiled anything because
they didn’t know anything about pathogens. Though not represented in the game,
freak accidents were also responsible for interrupting trips.
Women’s skirts would get caught underneath wagon wheels, dragging them underneath
and crushing them to death under massive carriages carrying cattle or supplies. Men
sometimes inadvertently shot themselves or others with their hunting rifles.
If you managed to not get crushed under a wagon or shot in the face, you could still be struck
by lightning or drown during a river crossing. While a watery demise was common in the game, real
settlers usually had the good sense to pay for a ferry across the river when one was available.
If you survived all that, you could still look forward to the occasional murder—tempers
could flare during a six-month journey, after all—or simply losing your mind,
both outcomes that were not reflected in the game. All in all, an estimated one in
10 settlers attempting the journey died, their bodies buried in shallow graves along the trail.
As morbid as The Oregon Trail could be at times, it wasn’t quite as dangerous as the real thing.
Even though The Oregon Trail would eventually lead students on countless voyages of deadly diarrhea,
kids loved it. Right from the start, it was a huge hit in Rawitsch’s history class
and he soon entered it into the timeshare system that allowed programs to be used by
the entire Minneapolis school district. Without any prompting from Rawitsch or other teachers,
kids had formed collaboratives, nominating the best student for each role and working
together toward the common goal of reaching Oregon. It made learning history fun.
And then, at the end of the semester, Rawitsch deleted it.
This wasn’t some complex computer game that he had spent months or years working on. It was a simple,
text-based learning tool that appeared to have outlived its usefulness. Rawitsch’s time at
the high school was up, and both he and his two roommates were about to graduate. There was no
reason to think The Oregon Trail would resurface. What Rawitsch didn’t know was that classrooms were
about to undergo a radical transformation—first in Minnesota, and then throughout the country. Since
the 1960s, the state had been home to a number of computer hardware manufacturers like IBM and
UNIVAC, and a number of groups and educators believed computers belonged in classrooms.
In 1973, they formed the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC. One of MECC’s key
figures, a math teacher named Dale LaFrenz, believed there was going to be a revolution
in education in the coming year, and MECC managed to get teletypes in classrooms across the state.
Hardware, of course, needs software. And MECC got a major break in 1974, when LaFrenz got a
call from a professor at Carleton College who told him he knew a man who had been drafted into
military service but was a conscientious objector and was looking for work. His name? Don Rawitsch.
Rawitsch had originally wanted to be a social studies teacher but needed to find a job that
met the government’s standard of benefiting society for those refusing to enter the war.
He went to work for MECC as a liaison between the group and local community colleges. As the
group began building a library of software titles, and Rawitsch had an idea. After consulting with
Heinemann and Dillenberger, he told MECC about The Oregon Trail. Fortunately, he had printed out
the code for the game before deleting it three years prior. Over Thanksgiving weekend of 1974,
he entered all 800 lines into MECC’s system. There were still no computer screens and therefore
no graphics at this point on the devices being used to play the game, but Rawitsch was still
able to make some improvements. He was able to reference actual diaries written by settlers
that were stored at the University of Minnesota library. That gave him accurate prices of goods
and it also gave him information on how frequently those familiar mishaps like a broken wagon wheel
or a thunderstorm occurred. If a settler had a 20 percent chance of running out of water on the real
Oregon Trail, for example, then players would have a 20 percent chance of running out in the game.
Rawitsch also made events geographically accurate. It was most common to see snow or deal with an
oxen injury beginning at the South Pass in the Rockies 950 miles into the trip, so that’s where
players would begin to see them in the game. There was also the matter of how the game
portrayed Native Americans. The earliest version of the game took a cue from old Westerns and
made Native Americans one of the villains. At MECC, Rawitsch realized that Native Americans,
historically, were actually more likely to help people on the Oregon Trail, which was
reflected in the updated game play. The villain characters were reimagined as generic ruffians.
The new, more historically accurate version of The Oregon Trail hit the MECC system in 1975
and was soon being accessed thousands of times a month by schools all over Minnesota. In fact,
it was the second most popular program on the system. Only an early email program got
more of that sweet teletype traffic. Don Rawitsch had gone from drawing a
crude map of the trail on paper to seeing a computerized version of the game being played
by thousands of students in the state. But The Oregon Trail was just getting started.
Remember MECC’s basic mission statement? That computers were headed for every
classroom in the country? By the end of the 1970s, that was becoming a reality.
Hardware manufacturers had been successful in developing and producing desktop personal
computers with dedicated processors, keyboards, and screens. Around 1978, one of MECC’s
coordinators went to a conference in California where he was shocked by the tiny computer he saw.
MECC soon went to California to negotiate with a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Their Apple II computer was sleek, compact, powerful, and perfect for schools.
MECC ordered 500 of them to distribute across Minnesota, each one loaded with MECC software
like an updated version of The Oregon Trail. The partnership between MECC and Apple blossomed,
and soon Apple found themselves at the forefront of classroom computing. School districts bought
computers from Apple and acquired software from MECC, which had built up a library of
educational titles like Number Munchers and Word Munchers. Schools and even entire states paid a
fee and were then allowed to copy the software as many times as they liked to distribute it to any
of their classrooms equipped with Apple IIs. By the early 1980s, roughly 5000 school districts,
or one-third of all districts in the country, had a deal in place with MECC. The game was
given increasingly better graphics. Together, these developments meant The Oregon Trail was
everywhere, and with six-color monitors and the ability to etch their own names on tombstones,
kids considered the game as much a part of their school week as Trapper Keepers and square pizza.
The Oregon Trail and other titles were so successful that MECC no longer needed to be tied
to the state. It started making games available at retail, where a growing number of consumers
who now owned home computers were buying both entertainment and educational software. In 1991,
MECC was sold off to venture capitalists for $5.25 million. It was later acquired in 1996 by SoftKey,
later named The Learning Company, which was bought by Mattel in 1999 for $3.8 billion. That’s where
Barbie comes in. Mattel supposedly wanted to slot some of their popular characters into
the game. But by that point in the late 1990s, most of the company’s best programmers had left,
and The Learning Company didn’t seem to be as valuable as the purchase price indicated,
causing Mattel’s stock price to plummet. Mattel’s shareholders sued and won a $122
million settlement. MECC faded away in 1999. The Oregon Trail is now owned by Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. With over 65 million copies sold and a place in the Strong Museum’s Video
Game Hall of Fame, it’s become a classic. The game has gone through several versions
and expansions over the years, including mobile games and even a game called The Amazon Trail,
which took players on a trip up the Amazon River. And while companies have tried to
upgrade its graphics or gameplay over the years, that was never really the point.
For millions of school kids, The Oregon Trail was an opportunity to make some very adult
choices—choices about family, about travel, and about survival. The Oregon Trail was a
19th century settler simulation, but it was also looking forward to a future that would be
driven by technology. Walking into a computer classroom and navigating the trail was early
practice for using the computers that would come to dominate their world. Of course, today,
it also provides a hit of nostalgia. You can even play The Oregon Trail II in your browser.
I’m still lousy at shooting deer and rabbits, though I did learn, in researching this script,
that when the game tells you “you were only able to carry 200 pounds of food back” from your metric
ton of animal carcasses, it was actually meant to represent the reality that additional food
would spoil, not that your team was too lazy to bring back the life-sustaining digital venison.
So what about Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger? Heinemann and Dillenberger
realized their dreams of becoming teachers and have since retired in Minnesota. Rawitsch is still
working as a tech consultant and has recently been working on a new educational software venture.
None of them could have foreseen what The Oregon Trail would become, and they weren’t
thinking of profit participation. None of those million-dollar transactions involved them.
But all three have expressed satisfaction that the game they created has been so instrumental
in education over the years. And in 1995, the three of them received public acknowledgement of
their achievement when a new version of the game debuted at the Mall of America in Minneapolis.
With a real bison standing nearby, the three signed their names to a giant map
of The Oregon Trail. Unlike many of the players, they had made it to the end.
I’m Erin McCarthy and I need to go buy some oxen. If you have any suggestions
for a future installment of Throwback, leave them in the comments below.
But please don’t tell me I died of dysentery. Thanks for watching.