The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail is an educational video game originally created in 1971 by student teachers Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger for a Minnesota high school class, simulating a family's journey by wagon along the historical Oregon Trail while managing supplies, health, and hazards along the way. The game was later acquired and substantially expanded by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, whose 1985 version became a fixture of American school computer labs for the following decade. The Oregon Trail's frequent, sometimes abrupt player deaths from disease or accident, especially dysentery, became a widely referenced part of American popular culture well beyond the classroom setting in which the game was originally used.