Epic Win: Oregon Trail
Submitted by C Klima
Oregon Trail had a few things going for it that made it a truly epic game. The first was that there was always a chance of truly random DEATH!, which we here at OUAW support 100%. You didn’t even have to do much to end up like this:
Or this:
The second thing was that since this game was educational, it was in most schools’ computer labs, and all the computers were networked. If you had a DEATH!, you could leave a tombstone for your fallen family member. Hilarity could then ensue:
You also had to do an insane amount of hunting and bullet buying. What’s not to love about Oregon Trail? Educational games FTW!
My god I remember this! I always played the slightly-later, slightly more advanced games, but it tickled me so much to watch my friends play this game and suddenly die after being trampled in a stampede or catching a random disease. Pure greatness.
I played this game until I managed to break it.
Just for giggles my sister and I would load up our wagon with nothing but, like, eight stoves, fifty pounds of beads and some candles and see how long it took them to die.
I always had Amazon Trail.
lol i was playing oregon trail 2 like 5 minutes ago
hunting ftw
Awesome animal-shootout action. Fuck wasting money on food when you can buy 1000 bullets and go wild in the forest!
“You have shot 65000lbs of meat. You can carry 15lbs back to your wagon”.
Conservation fail.
The movie is of a later version than the original, right?
The one I played was on a black screen with green graphics, like the death pictures.
Good, good fun.
Yeah – I played the non-graphics green/black version in the mid-80’s as well. You had to keep track of all your own stats and info because there weren’t multiple parts of the screen, you could just see your previous few decisions as they were still visible on the lines above on the screen. Apple II !
i love this game! i just found the old old version that you can play online: http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html. i forgot how slow it really was. guess it was fast back then though…
The fact that virtual apple doesn’t run on a Mac seems a little weird to me.
Thanks for the link! It kept me up way later than I wanted to be
That’s the version I remember from grade school, the classic oregon trail if you will.
6438 points, Trail Guide! No deaths, but we had an outbreak of broken arms and one non-fatal case of Typhoid. Took over a “year” to get there though. I was too busy trying to find the deal of the century by trading with other emigrants. Too many people were trying to trade me a set of clothing for an ox!
(link goes to funny oregon trail screencap i found online from a later version)
“Aquaman drowned”? :O
Never played this but we did get Amazon Trail out of a cereal box once. I could never get past the island where the strange man tied me up.
Are you sure that wasn’t “Michael Jackson Trail” or “John Wayne Gacy Trail?”
Loved this game. I remember playing it in 5th grade. Where can I play it now?
I love this game…I still have it, actually.
Amazon Trail was always way harder. I could get to Oregon but I could never get through the Amazon.
oh_em_GEE!!! computer time (playing oregon trail, natch) was like, THE ONLY reason i worked hard to get my classwork done quickly… loves it!
OH MY GOD!! Best game ever!
EPIC WIN
THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER. I used to speed through my reading assignments in 4th grade so I could get the computer first in the class, I had to play this. Thank you Oregon Trail, for your secondary educational purpose, teaching me to speed read.
holy crap. I love this game. I play the ridiculous version on my cell phone (those of you who have tmobile should DL it).
As for the amazon Trail, fishing was WAY fun, but while i can always beat Otrail, i fail at Atrail… i’ve never beaten it. -sigh-
My friend and I worked together and beat Amazon Trail 2 once. We were freaking out. At the end you ascend this temple and the gods or some such send you back home.
Took us hundreds of games to get to that point, though.
best game ever! i remember playing it on some dope green screen computers! i remember dying and being so mad. or when your ox fell in the river, you were so screwed!
HAHA, they have this on FB now as an application, still pretty cool!!!
played it today.
Oh WOW! I loved this game! I never won, though. Always died of dysentery before making it all the way.
There’s only so many times you can die of dysentery and still want to play……
The best version of this game was the original black and green, on the Apple IIe.
MAJOR WIN.
Does anyone have another link to play it online? The other one isn’t working for and I would LOVE to play it. I agree that Oregon Trail is a MAJOR WIN, one of my fav games of all time. I always loved to go hunting and kill way more than I needed just for the hell of it.
There is a version that is an application on facebook if you have that….
Check that. They had to change the name… it’s “northwest trail” and.. it’s kinda the same thing.
I played the mid-90s Mac version, which, most unfortunately, didn’t allow you to customize a tombstone for your fallen party. Or at least my copy didn’t. I feel totally gypped now, even though the Oregon Trail WAS an awesome game.
Anecdote: I used to work on a trail-building crew, and at least once a day, we’d start pretending we were in the Oregon Trail game. Since we had no electricity–just our imaginations–it was kind of like Dungeons and Dragons with pioneers and dysentery instead of wizards and monsters. Or small children playing pretend with particularly disturbed and gruesome minds. (Usually, everybody in our “wagon party” would die a gruesome death, starting with dysentery and then getting insane. My favorite was “a house made of buffalo chips collapsed and smothered me,” from one of the more imaginative guys on the crew.)
This one time… at band camp…
BEST WIN YET
Whenever I played this I always named everyone after the Spice Girls or my friends to see who would die first. Stupid Ginger Spice ALWAYS SURVIVED EVERYTHING.
I remember playing this onthe old apple in school i thinki only managed to get everyone to oregon 3 times out of i could not tell you how many times lol, my pearty died of dysentery so many times i looked it up to see wtf they died from lol
early stages…1994…computer lab…don’t think I ever made it past the river ford
We had one of these in England in our schools, except it was about the plague. We were put into groups (families). We had to log on to see if the plague had killed us in the night.
Even the plague knows not to mess with da church…
I was a priest and my family died but I lived on
…Man, England gets all the cool stuff.
that sounds freakin awsome!
I played Oregon Trail before. I seem to always die a few minutes in.
I love how it is so nonchalant when someone dies. Like the clothing and axles are more important than your drowned family member.
I think that’s my tombstone. Unless someone with the same name enjoyed the same joke and had equally bad spelling. Anyone know the source? Turns out the school I went to didn’t purge the Apple IIes until last year. 17+ years of Oregon trail. I can’t image anything that could survive that environment for that long.
I don’t ever remember playing this. I played one of the Amazon Trail games though, it kills me that I can’t remember which one, I wanna get it off Ebay. I just need to find somewhere with screenshots of all 3 Amazon Trail games >_>;
These are like.. the best educational games xD
You can die from getting the shits? I’m in real trouble.
I ended up owning a limited edition version where all the people are pictures in stupid costumes, with weird talking animations, pasted unfittingly.
And no dysentery
You have shot 1800 pounds of meat.
You were able to carry back 4.
aaah, I remember this game. loved it! I loved hunting and I loved the death! I got a much, much later version a few years ago…it was HORRIBLE! Total fail! It wasnt all pixel and 2-D like the original, it was 3-D and the people looked real…and the worst part… NO ONE DIED! I got to the end and my whole party was still alive! It made me sad and I quickly chunked the thing.
YES!!!! Our teachers made us work in groups or ‘wagon trains’. I’d always choose the people I hated most *the popular kids-loserme* and they’d die of dysentery, or some other atrocity.
I absolutely adored this game. When we had computer class (once a week in elementary and middle school) we’d have 20 minutes free time to play. BEST GAME EVER!
Ahhh, nothing I liked more in 1984 than dying and quoting Eminem songs on the tombstones I left behind.
……………..Were you predicting the future songs by Eninem? Last time i heard, he was just a skinny white boy with a bad haircut in 1984. Are yiu sure you weren’t quoting songs by Prince?
Two dollars in the bargain bin at my local computer store. I’m glad I still have a floppy drive!
This post and all these comments have me cracking up.
I remember playing this game in computer class. I was awful at it!! haha..
oh my goodness! I thought I was one of the only people ever to play this game. My uncle, the geek he is, found it one day at the school’s Board Office and somehow it made it to my grandparents house. I started playing one day and I was in awe of its awesomeness. I loved hunting the best
I used play this at school. I gave the other family ,members names that were bizzar and sometimes rude. One of my signature tombstones war “Darn it, Jeb, gimme back my tube socks!”.
WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN!~
I was always horrible at hunting. I don’t think I knew anybody who could actually win the game. Is it even possible?
I remember this was one of two games we could choose from at school on Fridays in computer class. Oregon Trail and Number Munchers. Oregon Trail FTW! Who wants to practice numbers and words on Friday? Pssh.
(Hunting for me included spinning around in a circle and constantly shooting bullets hoping that something would peek out from behind the bushes. I could never get it like those good ole redneck boys showing me how huntin’ is really done.
)
hahaha my hunting style as well! somehow id always end up getting the bufflao and only be able to carry like five pounds back
sadly this style has stayed with me in my one and only attempt to play Halo 2. it was co op mode and my bf at the time kept yelling for me to respawn him, i had NO idea what that ment or how to do it so i just shot in a circle and somehow won the level
That was amazing
I remember that game sooooo much! It was like the best game EVER!! I do not remember if I ever beat it… Always trying to pick the best profession so that mabye you had more money, or you knew medicine and could fix problems. Don’t want to carry to much stuff so that you are not all weighed down, but need enough items to survive! And then that river! Oh my gawd
I played this all the time in my elementary school days… EPIC win.
awww I had to play this at school and it was sooooooooo bad omg
This game is the reason I became the massive geek I am today. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent on the computer playing this between 1990 and 1995. First video game I ever played.
if you go to busted tees they have an epic shirt. i always get an odd glance then the spark of realization then a laugh then “is that from….?”
so amazing. best video game ever.
My sister and I just laughed until we cried at “Here Lies Andy. Peperony and chease” Oh man….I can’t breathe…
My sister and I just laughed until we cried at “Here Lies Andy. Peperony and chease” Oh man….I can’t breathe…
I always loved that ending….. “What do you want on your tombstone?” where’s that commercial?
Man, I had the Canadian Version of this. Essentially you had to build up a farm near Toronto in the 19th century. You had the possibility of being stabbed in the jaw in a bar fight, which is what we were always gunning for.
I totally remember playing this in elementary school…. in black and white… on a mac…. with less file storage space than my digital watch.
Such a fun game. I should search for a bittorrent download of this… hope they didn’t have copy protection back then.
I remeber this game all to well. I always died by ‘Drowning In The River’ It pissed me off so much, but it was addictive as hell
I remember playing the 5th version of Oregon Trail in elementary school. I used to love it. I was always one of the last ones to die because I would always make my character a Doctor. I think it was usually starvation that killed me. xD
I’m old enough that I played the original, very first, c.1979 edition of Oregon Trail in school! The hunting scenes were basically limited to timing your shots as the animals ran across the top of the screen… and then that stinking flashing outline of a deer would change speeds on you!
Still, it was always a nice accomplishment to succeed, and get that full-screen text “letter” from President Polk.
Man, the old MECC games… my particular favorite, though, was Nomad. “Coffee, tea, or milk?”
I never ended up dying. XD
I was just playing this online today for the first time in years. I died six stops away from Oregon. (And I just learned about this again in school this year.) How the hell did I mange to die?
I remember playing this game all the time in elementary school. I put in the names classmates I didn’t like to see how fast they would die. I also loved hunting.
Good times. I always shot like 800 pounds of buffalo just for the hell of it.
ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG!!!! they need to bring this game back I dont care if they use the old graphics or not I remember finishing my work as fast as I could so I could be the first one to play and there was always a crowd of people around telling you what to do.
We played this at school on big floppy disks. We laughed one when of our friends died of cholera or something, although back then we had no clue what kind of disease it was! You can still find this game online or as a download and play the old one, much more fun that the new ones.
That is probably the best game the world has ever seen. I still play mine, and I even have a shirt that says “You have died of Dysentery” I where it when I see friends, and it makes me sad to see them tilt their head in confusion as they read it. =,(
this game was the BEST in it’s day. the best!