The History of The Oregon Trail 58
Rick Zeman writes "Those of us of a certain age recall The Oregon Trail with fondness as the pioneering educational game that had the audacity to make learning fun! This article takes a look at the history behind the game, even going back to its initial text-based offering, showing how some programming magic pulled a generation of kids together. Quoting: '[F]or two weeks, the roommates holed up in a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School, where the school’s teletype was stored, and spent their evenings programming. Using Rawitsch’s historical knowledge, Heinemann and Dillenberger developed a series of algorithms, punching hundreds of lines of code into the teletype. But just because they created the program didn’t mean they could breeze through it. When Heinemann tried The Oregon Trail for the first time, he died of pneumonia midway!'"
Re:Not a word about the genocide? (Score:5, Interesting)
Man, what the hell are you talking about? It doesn't even touch on the subject and makes no justification for those things, nor does it even acknowledge it in a positive or negative light. Its a kids game focused on the journey, not genocide and politics. For its purpose, it does a great job. From TFA:
Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1974, Rawitsch exhumed his old yellow roll of code. Looking at the game again, he knew he could do better. Over the next year, he would thicken the plot, using facts he found from the diaries of Oregon Trail survivors. He discovered how often settlers ran out of water. He tallied the ways people died, and he took note of how Native Americans, contrary to popular belief, were actually quite generous with survival tips, letting settlers know whether it was safe to cross a river, for example.
Just because it doesn't have a big story line saying "genocide is wrong, mmmkay" doesn't mean it condones it.
Death of MECC was death of educational computing (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah MECC. I sometimes wonder how different the world would be if SoftKey hadn't MBA'ed all of the great educational-entertaining software companies into oblivion. After MECC, games went back to assited rote practice of basic skills, which is basically the entire educational games segment today. I kind of wonder if it would have happened anyway; was the time right just then, or would it have sustained and grown? The key is: I don't see games like Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, Rocky's Boots, etc. anymore--unless it's just re-skinned versions of those games.
Fun fact: the two major rights holders these days to the SoftKey (aka, The Learning Company) IP are Houghton Mifflin Harcort and Ubisoft. Yeah... those are some fun people to try and work with...