The DU Lounge

The game was loosely based on a statistical analysis from a large collection of diaries from folks who wagon trained out west in that period. It went through a few versions leading to the 1985 version some just slightly younger than my self encountered on the Apple IIe.

The Oregon Trail was created in 1971 by student teachers Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in Minneapolis to make history class engaging. Originally a text-based teletype game, it simulated a 19th-century westward journey, which Rawitsch later updated in 1974 for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) to include more historical accuracy and Random events