Oregon Trail
While helping my sister with her CD-ROM today, I threw in a disc to see what the problem was. That disc just happened to contain Oregon Trail.
It was the spiffed up Windows version of the game, of course, with all sorts of fancy bells and whistles like “background music” and “color graphics.” But behind the repetitive and strangely catchy music was the same game from so long ago. You know the one.
It was computer lab time in elementary school. Everyone would run in and take a seat next to their friends at their favorite computer, despite the fact they were all identically terrible. Apple had seemingly offloaded dozens of their lowest end II models on the school system and they were bound and determined to use them until the CONTROL-OPEN APPLE-RESET sequence shook the computer so hard that it disintegrated.
Number Muncher, Word Blaster, and all the flavors of Carmen Sandiego shared a huge diskette folder in what amounted to bulk software piracy on the part of the school. There were a few other games in there, like Lemonade Stand or the text adventures and such that the stragglers got left with (oh, the text adventures I was missing!) but I always secured my copy of Oregon Trail.
Being a kid at the dawn of the personal computer age, I wasn’t too sure why sometimes my saved games wouldn’t appear when I started the game up. Was it because I was at a different computer? Did the disk have something to do with it? Maybe the teachers were playing a trick on us. Looking back, I now know it was because Apple II’s didn’t have hard drives, and I would have had to grab the same disk each time to pick up where I left off. As it was, I enjoyed the randomness of never knowing whether I would get to restore a saved game or start a new adventure. I was careful to name all my characters the same thing in each game, appropriately enough after the members of my family.
Every week I would embark on my quest to reach Oregon as those around me attempted in vain to catch Carmen Sandiego (something no one ever accomplished) or munched numbers that matched 6 x 3. Occasionally one of my various parallel families would reach their goal, but it would take months of going to the computer room and playing to achieve this.
Tonight I beat Oregon Trail in about ten minutes. Go figure. During the trip Obadiah (I used the default names) died of a mysterious fever almost immediately. Beth and Ezra suffered through the measles, dysentery, typhoid fever, exhaustion, and cholera… and made it through just fine! My main character never got sick, nor did my fifth. I never even knew his/her name! There was one point where an impassable trail cost us eight days, which was bookended by about a week of fog. I say, if you’re lost for two weeks straight just start a settlement where you are and hope the idea catches on. Then you can have a city named after you!
