50 years of The Oregon Trail: The hidden controversies of a video game that defined the US

The Oregon Trail was once the most widely distributed software in US schools. It gripped a generation and changed gaming forever, but debates rage on about the history it depicts.

In the autumn of 1997, I fired up my school computer and set out across the United States. I loaded my covered wagon, harnessed my video-game-oxen and followed a 2,000-mile (3,219km) route stretching from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon. The journey nearly killed me, but by the end, it forever changed my understanding of the world.

Some 400,000 settlers took the same path in the 19th Century, only they traversed the real world instead of a glowing screen. Their gruelling trek became known as The Oregon Trail. It made for one of the most significant chapters in US history, a colonisation project that helped cement the country's domination of the land, its resources and the indigenous people who called it home. In 1974, an educational software company released a video game called The Oregon Trail that put players in the shoes of these immigrants. The game was specifically intended to be used in schools across the US, where it became a decades-long fixture. Bringing computer games to the classroom was a semi-radical idea, but the bet paid off.

You may not know the game if you grew up outside the US, but you've felt its impact. Some say The Oregon Trail launched the entire category of educational gaming. Its innovations became video games staples. If you've ever named a character in your gaming party, for example, you can thank The Oregon Trail, which popularised the very idea that you might name companions. But its biggest effects extend far beyond games. The Oregon Trail shaped entire generations' understanding of the US. Although many educators celebrate the game for getting children excited about history, it's also faced sharp criticism for taking a colonialist perspective, and ignoring those whose land was stolen by settlers. Developers have worked to include the stories of oppressed people in more recent iterations, but the debate continues over whether there is a more fundamental problem with turning the violence of westward expansion into a playful quest.

Fifty years after it was created, The Oregon Trail's legacy remains powerful and, in many ways, surprising. Hundreds of millions of players have attempted the journey – though most never make it to Oregon. The phrase "You have died of dysentery", a common end for voyagers, has spawned t-shirts and countless memes in its wake. The quote is even referenced in a bestselling 2022 novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, about an age bracket of Americans she calls "The Oregon Trail Generation". The game has also seen dozens of sequels, spinoffs and parodies, and now an upcoming live-action movie.

"The lasting fame of the game is a fascinating puzzle," says R Philip Bouchard, team leader and designer of the classic 1985 version of The Oregon Trail, released on the Apple II computer. But on a basic level, it's simple, he adds. "Most kids played The Oregon Trail at school," Bouchard says. "How often do you get to do really fun things at school?"

The Oregon Trail was first developed by a team of three teachers from Minnesota, US in 1971. The earliest iteration ran on a computer that didn't even have a screen. Students would read their progress on sheets of paper the computer printed out after every move.

The game was eventually picked up by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, and received its first wide release in 1974, when it was made available to educators across the state. The Oregon Trail was an immediate hit, but it wasn't until Bouchard's sequel for the Apple II that it became a sensation.

"At one time, The Oregon Trail was the most widely distributed piece of software in North American schools," Bouchard says. An affordable licensing program made it easy for teachers and administrators to adopt the game, and it spread like wildfire shortly after its release, he says. "Most kids of a certain era had a chance to play and enjoy the game at school. Consequently, the experience of playing The Oregon Trail is shared by an entire generation of people."

Players start in Missouri, a Midwestern state that marked the beginning of the American frontier in the early 19th Century. You select travel companions and choose supplies before facing obstacles on the trail, including broken wagon wheels, weather, snake bites and more. Activities along the way keep things interesting, including a hunting mini-game and managing the health of the party.

Back in the mid 1980s, many people believed the role of educational computer programs was to serve in lieu of a lecture or a textbook, according to Bouchard. "It was about as boring as anything could possibly be," he says. Instead, he wanted to design a programme that was a game first, but one that worked alongside traditional classroom instruction.

"The game itself was a memorable experience that planted a range of concepts in the mind of the student, including perceptions of geography and details of the historical experience," Bouchard says. "Most students would be quite curious to learn more. A good teacher would intuitively know how to build upon that curiosity."

Bouchard was interested in expanding the game from schools to a home audience and worked to include a variety of options to appeal to different groups. "The Oregon Trail appeals to a wide variety of players – those that are mostly like to hunt, those that love the challenge of managing resources, those that are fascinated by the sudden misfortunes that occur along the way."

The Oregon Trail helped demonstrate the commercial viability of video games in general, says Artur Plociennik, regional publishing director of World of Warships, a smash hit naval battle simulation game. "[The game] very likely influenced the first generation of serious developers of video games as entertainment products… [and] left an impact that's reverberating even now through the modern gaming community."

If you've spent time playing video games, you likely have experience with some of the mechanics popularised by The Oregon Trail.

"It was built on a few distinct design choices, and those choices were prominently present in many games that came after. Some of those choices even became foundations of whole subgenres or categories," Plociennik says. That includes everything from managing your inventory to the very idea that you can name your characters, or that those characters might die – permanently – and never come back. In modern games like Fallout, players expect random encounters when they're charting a course through the map, a feature he says The Oregon Trail helped cement.

But one of the biggest influences of The Oregon Trail comes down to something far simpler. "It did a great deal to make sure that history would play a central role in video game settings of the years to come," says Tore Olsson, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who's studied depictions of history in video games.

The first video games didn't include a lot of story. Pong was a game of table tennis; that was all the context you got. Later, sci-fi and fantasy became common fodder, but The Oregon Trail was among the first to prove history can make for great gaming.

"The underlying concept of The Oregon Trail – surviving a 2,000-mile journey across difficult terrain to a promised land – is perfectly suited to development as a game," Bouchard says. Westward migration is deeply embedded in American culture, he says, and putting players in the shoes of one of the people who made the journey added to its inherent appeal.

History is a primary focus in gaming, and echoes of The Oregon Trail ring through many of the titles that dominated computer games in the 1990s, Olsson says, such as Civilisation and Age of Empires. But some of the biggest parallels might be the 2018 blockbuster Red Dead Redemption II, which focuses on an outlaw cowboy in the American west of 1899.

Olsson, author of a book on the game called Red Dead's History, often calls Red Dead Redemption II "this generation's Oregon Trail". Though the games are very different, they have certain commonalities, he says. "They are both, at heart, survival games, showcasing the demanding task of achieving subsistence in an unforgiving landscape. And they are games about migration – about movement across space in pursuit of an ideology. And they have both been wildly influential in shaping people's understanding of the past."

According to Bouchard, building The Oregon Trail involved detailed study of history and geography, something future versions of the game included with increasing vigour. Developers say it helped set a standard for research in historical gaming.

"I myself played The Oregon Trail in my teens in the 90s, but I only learned to appreciate its impact much later, after joining the industry," Plociennik says. His team centres historical accuracy in their projects, partnering with experts and historians about everything down to the last rivet on their in-game ships.

The Oregon Trail was created as a teaching tool and accuracy was a primary goal for developers in every iteration that followed. But over the years, many have criticised the game for failing to represent the stories of Native Americans, people of colour and other marginalised groups.

"When we were kids, these games were presented as 'history', and no one bothered to tell us that people in The Oregon Trail were charting lands that had been charted by others first," says Alan Henry, managing editor of PC Magazine and a journalist who's spent years covering video games.

The original iterations of the game were "an uncritical celebration of eastern white settlers and their mission", where western migration is an adventure, not an invasion, Olsson says.

In the launch screen for a 1990s update to the game, Native American tipis sit in the background of a prairie landscape, alongside a rattlesnake and buffalo skull. "Native people are represented as an obstacle like snake bites and the landscape itself, and that land is emptied of any actual Indigenous people," says Margaret Huettl, an associate professor who focuses on Native American history at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, US. She consulted on the most recent version of The Oregon Trail.

"The 1990s and early-2000s versions of the games didn't do any more to include Native perspectives or complicate the triumphant narrative of westward expansion," Huettl says. It wasn't until the 90s sequels that developers added black people to the game, she says, but even then they only appeared as non-playable characters.

The people managing the game today readily acknowledge The Oregon Trail's failings. "The original game focused too heavily on one perspective only, the white Americans who were travelling west, looking for a new life in a new land," says Caroline Fraser, head of HarperCollins Productions, which now runs The Oregon Trail franchise.

Fraser says the company was focused on a stronger Native American perspective when they relaunched The Oregon Trail and worked with a team of Native American scholars including Huettl to review all aspects of the game.

"They helped us get the dialogue right, the music right, the clothing right, the names right," Fraser says. "They also helped us write playable stories within the game where you’re travelling as Native American characters, with their own aspirations and challenges."

Huettl acknowledges that the game has tried at various times to update the representation of Native Americans and other marginalised groups, and says she hopes the relaunch of the game does better.

"I am proud of the work that we did on this game," she says."There are mini-games that feature Indigenous-centred stories, and the dialogue in the game includes moments of critique on topics from slavery to the destruction of the environment and how that impacted Native people like the Pawnee." But Huettl also points out that ultimately, there are limits to how much the original, central storyline about settlers claiming land can be updated and made more inclusive. In her view, it remains a game that's made by non-Natives for a mostly non-Native audience.

"There are ways that the game continues to perpetuate myths about westward expansion," she says. "The driving motivation of the main storyline is to claim a plot of that Indigenous land for yourself. Winning means participating in Indigenous dispossession. No single game can dismantle all the problematic narratives of US expansion, but my hope is that we have created an experience that at least sparks conversations."

In October 2024, 50 years after The Oregon Trail's first wide release, news broke that HarperCollins has partnered with Apple to develop a live-action movie based on the game, complete with musical numbers in the vein of Barbie. "The re-launch of The Oregon Trail game has been incredibly successful, proving that this iconic game still has a massive fan base," says Fraser. Paired with the movie, it's part of a renewed effort to introduce the game and its story to the next generation of children.

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Despite the promising updates, some expect that The Oregon Trail is destined to become history itself. In the 1970s through the 1990s, The Oregon Trail was special in part because video games were still a novelty, but now, "The Oregon Trail has basically become legacy media – a household name from a different technological order," Olsson says.

"It will likely fade into nostalgic memories of childhood, and that's OK – because the cultural context is changing," he says. "Given that Oregon Trail was never very good history – it was too one-sided, too uncritical, and too simplistic – I'm all for replacing it with more dynamic and thoughtful representations of the past."

* Editing and additional reporting by Thomas Germain.

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