Crumple.News : The Oregon Trail: Simple Game with a Big Impact

In 1971, three student teachers at Carleton College in Minnesota created a computer game to teach their students about the westward expansion. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger programmed the game in BASIC language on an HP 2100 minicomputer with only 32 kilobytes of memory. The game was designed to simulate the experience of a family traveling from Missouri to Oregon in 1848 and teach students about the challenges faced by pioneers on the Oregon Trail. The game became popular in classrooms across the United States and eventually was published by MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) in 1985. Over the years, "The Oregon Trail" has undergone numerous updates and re-releases for various platforms. The original version of the game was text-based, and players had to use the arrow keys to navigate their wagon.