Dillenberger liked the idea and signed on as Heinemann’s debugger. Then he saw Rawitsch’s map, telling him, “Oh, this would be a perfect application for a computer.” He showed the map to another roommate, Paul Dillenberger, who was also teaching math. “There wasn’t much out there that was very fun,” he recalled. Heinemann had taken a few programming classes and played some basic simulation games - Civil War logistics and lunar landers among them. The pair, along with three other roommates, were all just months away from graduation at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., about 40 minutes south. “I saw this map on the floor and I said, ‘Oh, this looks interesting,’” said Bill Heinemann, then teaching math across town. Then, one evening just before Thanksgiving, one of his roommates came home, saw what Rawitsch was doing, and envisioned something completely different.Ī Game of Their Own: Summer Camp Empowers Girls to Design and Play Their Own Digital Works He’d been assigned to teach an eighth-grade history unit on westward expansion, and he wanted to do something new and interactive. There were no pictures or graphics, only lines of type and the occasional ringing bell.ĭon Rawitsch, then 21 and a student-teacher at Jordan, had developed it originally as a dice-and-card game, laid out on a long butcher paper map. Built by an unlikely trio of undergraduate teaching candidates, its first young players encountered it on a paper roll fed into a hulking teletype, connected by a phone line to a mainframe computer miles away.
The Oregon Trail is that rarest of artifacts, a computer game that predates the rise of the personal computer by about five years - even the first rudimentary video arcade and TV computer games were still a year off.
A familiar scene from an early version of The Oregon Trail, which put players in the shoes of westward explorers in 1848. The first students to experience The Oregon Trail were Baby Boomers, born in the late 1950s and now old enough to be grandparents.
Here’s the thing: If you thought the first kids to play this game were millennials in the 1990s, or even Gen Xers back in the 1980s, think again. And help The 74 make an impact.ĭonate now and help us reach our NewsMatch goal.