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The Oregon Trail

1985MECCApple II · DOS · Mac · PC
74Happy KittySadkitty Score
74KitSuperintelligent review
—CriticsNo critic reviews yet
—PlayersNo ratings yet
Tips & secrets
About the game

Lead a wagon party 2,000 miles from Missouri to Oregon's Willamette Valley in 1848, managing food, oxen, money and disease. The classroom favourite taught a generation of kids about frontier life, and about dysentery.

Kit's verdict · 7.4/10A nostalgia icon that's still oddly gripping for one trip, though the randomness wears thin. Kit · Sadkitty Games

Loved

  • Simple, tense resource management
  • Random events make every trip a story
  • The hunting minigame is a classic

Not so much

  • Deaths can feel totally random
  • Very little to do after a couple of runs

Play it if anyone with classroom nostalgia or a love of survival management.

Skip it if players who want control over their fate rather than dice rolls.

Ask Kit about The Oregon Trail →
Cheats & codes

No cheat codes

The Oregon Trail doesn't have cheat codes. The tips and secrets below are the next best thing.

Tips

Play it better

  1. The banker starts with the most money, but the farmer earns triple points at the end. Pick the banker to survive, the farmer for a high score.
  2. Buy extra oxen and spare wagon parts (wheels, axles and tongues) before you leave. Breakdowns without spares can end a run.
  3. Only ford a river when it's shallow, roughly under 2.5 feet. Deeper water is safer to caulk and float, or take the ferry.
  4. You can only carry about 100 pounds of meat back from a hunt, so don't waste bullets on more than you can lift.
  5. Set your pace to steady and rations to filling when people get sick, and rest for a few days to recover.
  6. Leave in spring. Leaving too late means crossing the mountains in snow.
Secrets & unlockables

Hidden in plain sight

Tap a secret to reveal it.

Did you know?

Trivia

  • It began in 1971 as a text game written by three student teachers, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, on a school teletype.
  • MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, turned it into the 1985 Apple II hit.
  • 'You have died of dysentery' became one of gaming's most famous lines and a meme.
  • The game was so common in US schools that it's credited with introducing millions of kids to computers.
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