Oregon Trail Software created by Broderbund, and later sold to the Learning Company, is fondly remembered by an entire generation who played it incessantly as one of the few, and sometimes the only, computerized game available in a school setting.

Imaginatively named "The Oregon Trail" it took students gently and irrevocably into a mad, mad world where death came almost blithely, (and unrealistically often) in the form of cholera or typhus, starvation or drowning. The goal was to end happily at the Willamette Valley - on the far side of the Oregon Trail.

Mostly, there was a lot of dying and trying.

There were buffalo and deer to be shot, and hostile natives to avoid. This software game was perhaps the first attempt at real-life simulation and it was the game template which all later software developers had stamped in their brain. Kill things, die horribly -- or beat the challenge.

Not much has been written about the influence the Oregon Trail software has had on the development of later games. Due to it's enormous popularity, and the tender age of it's users (who are now developing software for their own children) the impact must have been tremendous and seminal.

Find it on your favorite, ubiquitous auction channel - ebay:
oregon trail game + oregon trail book + pioneer photo + old west photo

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