(gentle contemplative music)
- [Narrator] In 1869,
German American painter Albert Bierstadt,
known for his landscapes of the American frontier,
completed one of his most famous works.
He called it "Emigrants Crossing the Plains,"
but most people refer to it as "The Oregon Trail."
- And he painted a lot of pictures of the Rocky Mountains,
which, in those days, there was no photography, or not much,
so it was best for an artist to go out
and paint pictures of what he saw.
And he brought those back to the East Coast,
and it created an interest in people moving out West.
You see the beautiful sunsets.
You see the idyllic setting of the cows
eating the grass under the trees.
Artists are often the leaders in new ideas
and new ways of thinking about things.
So, in some sense, I guess, Paul and Don and I were artists
drawing a picture of what could be
in the educational computer software.
(light thoughtful music)
- [Narrator] In 1971, three student teachers
in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
created an educational simulation game
about traveling the Oregon Trail.
Multiple generations of children played the game at school,
thanks to the rise of the personal computer
and its incorporation into classrooms.
More than 50 years later, "The Oregon Trail" series
has sold more than 65 million copies
and has been inducted
into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
The game is now a permanent fixture in pop culture.
But for the original creators,
the game's success did not translate to financial wealth.
They made the game for themselves,
and, more importantly, to help teach their students.
- We were not creating the program to be entrepreneurs,
we were just trying to do good teaching.
We're certainly enjoying the fame
that we've gotten since then.
And it's nice to tell our story.
And, you know, the fact that I don't
own some island somewhere, it's not a big deal. (chuckles)
- More just lucky coincidence
that I happened to be at the right time,
doing something that nobody else had done.
It's interesting,
I've worked hard at a lot of different things,
but instead, I get a lot of recognition
for something I spent 10 days on
and was having a ball doing it.
- [Narrator] This is the story of how a little computer game
about westward expansion in the United States
made learning fun,
and how it changed the software industry,
computers in education,
and the lives of millions of students.
This is the story of "The Oregon Trail."
40 miles south of Minneapolis,
on the banks of the Cannon River,
is the town of Northfield, Minnesota,
home to Carleton College.
It's a small, private liberal arts college,
often considered one of the top schools in the Midwest.
- Carleton I knew was a good school.
I applied to it because a friend of our family's
had gone there.
And Carleton had 300 to 400 in each year,
so maybe there were 1,600 or 1,500 students there.
So it was a small setting.
The classes were small.
They had seminars that had small groups of people.
And it was a very socialistic school.
Once you paid your tuition, everything else was free.
They kind of equalized everybody there.
- I looked at a bunch of different colleges.
I applied to Princeton, but I didn't get in.
I looked at Northwestern in Illinois,
but I did not like the campus at all.
I looked at Carleton in Minnesota,
which was kind of a high-powered school,
and That looked like the kind of environment I wanted,
which was a little bit not in the city,
kind of rural setting.
And everything was contained on campus,
and I kind of liked that.
At the time, I think the tuition for Carleton
was $3,000 a year, which sounds like a real bargain now.
(bright thoughtful music)
- [Narrator] In the fall of 1971,
Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann
were seniors at Carleton College.
They were math majors,
hoping to become teachers after graduation.
- Well, it seemed to be the subject that I did the best in.
I remember looking at my high school teachers
and thought, "You know what?
"It'd be kind of fun to be a math teacher."
- Well, I always liked math when I was a kid.
I had an older brother who was five years older
who was into math,
and he would teach a lot of things to me about math
before I got to them in school.
I think part of why I wanted to be a teacher
is I had seen it done, and I enjoyed learning,
and I wanted to make it enjoyable for other people to learn.
- I met Bill Heinemann in a math methods class.
We had a professor who would try to teach us
what to expect in a class, how to teach a lesson,
we'd practice on each other, how to design a lesson.
Bill's a nice guy.
We got along right away.
- I first met Paul my freshman year
when he was on the same floor as I was.
He was an interesting character.
He had real long hair at the time,
and that was new to me. (chuckles)
And he also played a guitar in a rock band or something.
- [Narrator] Dillenberger and Heinemann were on their way
to becoming math teachers,
but there was a new, up-and-coming field,
that also caught their interest, computing and programming.
And in Minnesota, it was thriving.
(light groovy music)
Between the 1950s and 1980s,
Minnesota had a bustling computing industry.
Author Joy Lisi Rankin described the Twin Cities
as having a "computer identity."
Companies such as Honeywell, Control Data, IBM, UNIVAC,
and more, all had headquarters or offices in the area.
Some companies partnered with the University of Minnesota
and made the state a central hub for research
and manufacturing.
- So back in the early '70s, computers were quite different
than how we think of them today.
There were no personal computers.
A typical computer might cost $1 million.
It would be huge.
It'd be taller than a person.
It would occupy a big room,
often in the basement of the building.
It would have a whole team of people attending to its needs,
so quite a different thing.
- [Narrator] Despite the high cost,
the possibilities of computing seemed endless.
People were finding new ways to integrate computers
into their everyday lives,
and soon, it made its way into education.
Organizations popped up around the state
to incorporate computers into the classroom.
In 1967, 18 Minnesota school districts
formed a new organization called Total Information
for Educational Systems, or TIES.
Their goal was to get students
and teachers familiar with computing.
Administrators could input schedules or process payroll.
Teachers could incorporate programs
and games into their lessons.
(coach yelling)
Students could use the computer
to keep track of sports scores and statistics.
Carleton College also caught the computer bug
that was going around Minnesota.
(baseball bat thwacks) (crowd cheering)
Students used computers to keep track of batting averages
in the softball league.
There were computer science courses
and lectures on programming.
Carleton even had their own programming language, FOCARL,
a modified version of FOCAL.
- At Carleton, the thing that was nice about that
compared to the high school class,
was that you worked on what was called a teletype,
which was a big clunky old typewriter.
And you would phone up the mainframe computer,
which was at Carleton.
You'd type in your computer code, then you could type "run"
and it would follow the statements that you wrote
and you'd get immediate feedback.
This is really nice because now I can debug in real-time,
rather than having to keep waiting a week,
waiting another week, and so forth.
- [Narrator] But one of the more popular
uses of the computer was gaming,
and students not only played games, they made them.
One student created a pinball game
that was eventually banned from the computer lab
because staff kept having to repair the joysticks.
- And that was kind of a neat, interactive game.
That was probably the best game
that was on the computer lab.
I don't know, one of the other Carleton students
wrote that, I guess.
And then, there was another program
that captured my imagination.
It was a program called "ELIZA."
It would try to initiate a conversation
with the person at the computer.
(laughs) It really wasn't very intelligent,
but it gave me the possibility
that, hey, you could do things with computers
that aren't just numbers.
You can do things with sentences,
interacting with a person.
You can ask them a question, they can answer.
You can pick up that answer.
You can do something with that answer.
(soft contemplative music)
- [Narrator] For Bill Heinemann,
computers were a revelation.
- And I spent a lot of time in the computer lab
because having a computer at your fingertips
to do your bidding, whatever you tell it to do, it does it.
And it's like you have your own servant to do things,
and you can command it to do whatever you wanted it to do.
They had only a five-week programming course,
and I took that.
And I really enjoyed that
and thought that was one of the easiest classes
I had at Carleton.
So, this logic and computing was where my talents were.
And I took a game theory course,
and I wrote a program that analyzed the game of kalah,
the game with the pits and the stones.
And I wanted to find out what the winning first move was,
if there was such a thing.
And I programmed it so that it learned.
It was a heuristic program that, as it played,
it would learn how to play and improve.
And I watched it for, it must have been two or three hours.
And I saw that it's not anywhere close to the end yet.
So I put a sign on the computer, "In use,"
and I went back to my dorm, went to sleep,
got up the next morning, hurried over to the computer lab
to see if it was done or what was going on.
And it said, "Out of memory." (laughs)
So I never did figure out what the first right move was.
But I had a program that would figure it out.
But at that time, the computer just didn't have enough
power to do that.
- [Narrator] But programming on the computer
would have to wait.
In the fall of 1971, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann
began their student teaching assignments.
- The student teaching experience that we had
was a 16-week program
where you would live up in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area.
Carleton is a good hour south of Minneapolis,
and so they actually rented us an apartment.
And there were five of us,
two social studies teachers, three math teachers,
that lived in this apartment.
- There were two bedrooms.
There were two of us in each bedroom,
and one slept on the couch.
We did our own cooking and kinda took turns.
I think maybe after I did my turn cooking,
they said, "You don't have to cook anymore, Bill."
So the five of us would go off
and do our student teaching, come back,
and then just share the experiences that we had teaching,
and problems that we encountered,
and successes that we'd had.
- [Narrator] One of their roommates was Don Rawitsch,
a history major from Homewood, Illinois.
Rawitsch originally wanted to be a math teacher,
but when he arrived at Carleton College,
he quickly realized that math
was much more advanced than he thought.
He switched over to history,
thanks to his love of non-fiction books.
- I knew Don just because everybody knew Don. (laughs)
He was the Rotblatt czar, which was the softball league
that almost everybody at Carleton participated in.
- We lived on the same floor, but at different ends of it.
But I didn't really get to know him
until we lived in this apartment
and this student-teaching experience.
Don's very methodical.
He's a good leader.
He has good ideas.
We got along very well, as well.
- [Narrator] Dillenberger and Heinemann
were assigned to do their student teaching
at Bryant Junior High, near downtown Minneapolis.
Rawitsch taught at Jordan Junior High,
about 20 minutes north,
and was assigned an eighth-grade American history class.
(light acoustic folk music)
For Rawitsch, it was a somewhat challenging environment.
The students, quote, "didn't sit still for anything,"
and his supervising teacher
taught in a very traditional way,
reading mostly from a textbook.
At Carleton College, Rawitsch learned the importance
of finding new ways to educate students,
incorporating creativity into the curriculum.
He put those ideas to the test.
One time, he and a fellow student teacher
dressed as the famous explorers Lewis and Clarke
and told the students about their travels.
Another time, Rawitsch had a teacher pretend to shoot him
with a starter pistol in front of the class.
(gun pops) (students screaming)
The students put on a mock trial
and learned how people observe an event differently.
- [Don Narrator] "I was excited and maybe a little naive.
"I really wanted to do some things in the classroom
"that the students were not necessarily used to."
Don Rawitsch.
- [Narrator] By November of 1971,
Rawitsch had mostly been observing the classrooms,
but now it was time for more responsibilities.
His supervising teacher assigned him the unit
on westward movement in the United States,
he would have two weeks to prepare.
Once again, Rawitsch looked for creative ways
to engage the class.
He came up with the idea for a board game
where students would be assigned roles on a wagon train
and make their way through a frontier trail.
As he brainstormed how the game would work,
Dillenberger and Heinemann
arrived home from student teaching.
- Don had this big roll of butcher paper or something
rolled out on the floor.
It took up the whole length of the living room.
I said, "What is this?"
And he said, "Well, it's a game.
"I'm teaching a unit on the westward expansion,
"and I want the kids to play this game."
- He had lots of cards, I remember,
that had different things that could happen to you
along the trip on the trail.
- Then he described a little bit more
of what the game was like,
and he was gonna have the kids shake dice.
I thought, "This is actually a perfect
"application for a computer program."
And Don was like, "What in the world are you talking about?"
And I said, "No, no, no.
"I could have the computer keep track
"of what supplies you have,
"and instead of shaking dice to see how fast you go,
"it could be dependent upon
"how much you spent on your wagon.
"The more you spend, the better wagon you have,
"the faster it goes.
"The more you spend on your oxen, the faster it goes.
"I could have it figure out
"how much stuff you had in your wagon
"and how much weight that was,
"and the lighter of the wagon, the faster it went.
"We could have you eat.
"And when you eat,
"you could decide if you wanna just eat a little bit
"to try to just barely stay alive,
"or do you wanna eat a little bit more substantial meal.
"And depending on how well you ate,
"it would consume your resources, your food faster,
"but you would have a better chance of staying healthy."
So all these ideas came flooding into me.
And he said, "Well, it sounds great, Bill,
"but I need this by next Friday."
And I thought a little bit and said, "Yeah.
"I can have something working by next Friday,
"can't we, Paul?"
- I looked at him, and I looked at Don,
and said, "Yeah, I think we could do that."
- I don't know if he understood what my question was.
What my real question was:
"Paul, is it okay if we stay at school
"from the time school gets out to 9:00 at night
"for the next seven or eight nights?"
- [Narrator] As the trio discussed the possibilities
of their new game, one question remained:
Which frontier trail would they use
as the base of their game?
For Rawitsch, there was only one choice:
It was the longest and most traveled trail of them all,
the Oregon Trail.
(bright folk music) (horse whinnying)
Between 1836 and 1869,
more than 400,000 people made the 2,170-mile journey
to Oregon.
They were farmers and ranchers, hoping to acquire more land.
Business people starting new ventures.
Missionaries wanting to spread the word.
Miners hoping to strike gold.
And families seeking a better life.
- I find this episode of American history fascinating,
this westward migration,
and particularly, the Oregon Trail aspect.
This was a bit of history written by ordinary people.
So much of what we read about history
is all about famous names:
The presidents who did things.
The religious leaders who did things.
The captains of industry who did things.
And here was something where we don't worry about the names,
we worry about what these 400,000 people did.
And we treat each of those 400,000 people
as being heroic in their own way,
making this very difficult 2,000-mile journey to Oregon
in order to try to have a better life.
And that's why this episode in history
is particularly well adapted for a game.
You don't have to change history,
you can just be one of those 400,000 people
making that journey.
- [Narrator] Over the weekend, Don Rawitsch,
Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger
laid the foundation for their new game.
Rawitsch, admittedly, "knew nothing about computers."
His role was to, quote, "bring the history into it,
"and suggest the various things
"that could happen to settlers traveling the trail."
Heinemann was the main programmer,
he drew up flowcharts for the game
and wrote the majority of the code by hand on paper.
Dillenberger was, essentially, the debugger.
He wrote up subroutines, cleaned up the text,
and tested the game.
- After talking to Don about what was done,
I started imagining the things that I would do,
and started asking Don, and we had a lot of feedback.
"If I do this, is that gonna work?
"How many turns?
"How long do you want this game to last?"
And then I asked Don, "Well, how long did it take
"the wagon trains usually to get where they were going?"
And so we discussed this,
and I finally decided that each turn
would represent two weeks.
- You'd have so much money, you could buy oxen
and supplies and food, and you type in these numbers.
And so, I would say, you know, "Today is March 24th, 1841,"
or something like that.
And then depending on where you are in that two-week period,
certain things could happen to you.
- My favorite part of the game was actually coding
some of the probabilities into it.
So it was not just the probabilities of the luck things,
but the probability of getting attacked by a rider
was low at the very beginning.
They're too close to civilization.
But it spiked in the Plains,
where you weren't far enough away from civilization
that you didn't have some characters coming after you
trying to take your possessions.
- We tried to figure out what probability is
that something would happen.
And so we would figure, "Well, the probability's pretty high
"in the mountains that your wagon wheel might come off,
"or you might be too cold."
- One of the things that you could do
was stop to go hunting.
There was a timed input so that we could record
how long it took for them to respond.
So if they spelled "bang" wrong, they didn't get anything.
They were a terrible shot.
If they took too long, they didn't get anything.
If they took a reasonable amount of time,
they got a reasonable amount of meat from hunting.
And if they did it very quickly,
then they were rewarded even more.
- I remember coming with the idea, as well,
"If they're gonna die, let's ask if they want a gravestone
"or do they want a priest, or whatever."
- When we were programming this,
Paul and I were confined to the computer room
at Bryant Junior High,
which was actually a janitor's closet.
It was about big enough to hold a ladder and a bucket,
and that was about it.
Then instead, they'd taken the ladder and the bucket out,
and they'd put a teletype and two chairs,
one at the computer,
and one on the other side of the doorway. (chuckles)
- The computer was in kind of a closet.
We would spend time after school working on it.
And I believe one weekend we even took the darn thing home
to the apartment and called via our phone there.
(light thoughtful music)
- [Narrator] Over the course of two weeks,
Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger
had created an educational computer game.
It was one of only a few at the time.
- There were a few, I don't wanna call them educational.
There was a Civil War simulation,
which basically the only thing you educated there
is if you give your soldiers enough cigarettes you win.
And it wasn't very interesting at all.
And as soon as we started writing this,
we said, "This is way better
"than anything that's out there."
- We were young. We were 21 years old.
It was a fun thing to do.
And Don put his trust in us that we could get this done.
He stopped what he was doing and said, "Okay,"
you know, "go ahead and do this."
(computer keyboard clicking)
- [Narrator] With the programming complete,
Heinemann and Dillenberger did
what any good game developer would do,
they put their game to the test.
- We put it on the Bryant account first,
and we named it "OREGON."
Bill and I tried it out with our kids before
Don's class tried it.
(bright gentle music)
The first time we had students play the program,
they got really into it.
There'd be one kid at the keyboard
and there'd maybe be three or four kids
standing behind that person, watching
and reading what's going on.
- The word quickly spread through the school
that there was this cool program,
you could play, "Oregon Trail."
And so kids were bringing their friends
and pretty soon, there was a long lineup before school,
after school, lunch.
The computer was constantly busy
for the rest of the time we were there.
I figured out that one of the students
that was there at the time was Prince.
And I remember one of the teachers saying,
"There's a kid in the school here who has his own business.
"He's a musician, and he writes his own songs."
And I figured out later who that was. (chuckles)
- We knew there was something to this game
because of the way the kids were attracted to it.
- [Narrator] Both students and faculty
were enamored with the game.
But some staff members had concerns.
- I remember that when we first put it up there,
the people from Bryant Junior High came over to us
and said, "You can't say that somebody was 'tomahawked.'"
There was an Indian population in that area.
And I thought, "Well, they're right.
"You want the Indian kids to enjoy playing this game, too.
"You don't want them to always be
"fighting against themselves, and portrayed as the bad guy."
- We would say things like "Indians ahead,
"they look hostile."
We changed it to, "Riders ahead, they look hostile."
You know, I grew up in the 1950s and '60s,
and I watched, you know, Westerns.
In the Westerns, you know, the Indians were the bad guys.
So, yeah, like I said, we were a little naive about that,
but we learned quickly, and we made changes
and kept it that way.
- [Narrator] With the testing phase complete,
it was time to debut "OREGON" in a classroom.
(school bell ringing) (students chattering)
On Friday, December 3rd, 1971,
at Jordan Junior High in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
Don Rawitsch introduced his lesson plan
on westward movement in the United States.
He split the classroom into groups of five
and had them rotate through various activities,
including textbook readings and worksheets.
One of those activities was the "OREGON" game.
For the majority of the students,
it was their first experience using a computer.
(bright thoughtful music)
- He would have the kids in groups,
and he'd assign each person a different role,
so they would kind of go as a team
and make decisions as a team.
Depending on what the computer decided,
each run ended up being different,
which was, I think, kind of nice about it.
I think one of the things that the program was successful
was because there were so many different things
that could happen in different places along the trail,
so it wouldn't always work out the same way every time.
- [Don Narrator] "If I sat five students down
"at the teletype device
"and told them to follow the instructions,
"I was interested to see how they would solve the problems
"of group decision making.
"At first, it was chaos,
"but the clock forced them to create a democracy
"to make decisions."
Don Rawitsch
- And it put the kids in the driver's seat, so to speak.
One of the things that maybe it wasn't intentional,
but I realized right away
that when we put this program out there,
that it was gonna not only teach history,
but they were gonna have to do math
to figure out how much money they had left
and what they were gonna spend it on.
The other thing is reading.
Some of the kids, even though they were in eighth grade,
we were in the inner city of Minneapolis,
some of the kids, their reading skills were not very good.
So the kids learned how to read, how to do math,
how to plan ahead,
and a little bit of history on the side, too.
(light folk music)
- [Narrator] Rawitsch used the "OREGON" program
for one week, teaching three or four classes a day.
He estimated about 100 kids experienced the game.
And just like at Bryant Junior High,
the students at Jordan Junior High were obsessed with it.
Kids came in after school
or skipped lunch to play the game again.
But with the fall semester coming to an end,
the buzz over "OREGON" was short-lived.
- Since it was on the Bryant Junior High account,
we had to give Don our passwords
so he could use it at his school,
which was Jordan Junior High.
So, I remember talking to the district computer person,
and they were looking at their records to say,
"Now, wait a minute.
"Bryant is signed in two different times.
"How can that be?"
So they kind of figured out what we had done.
- [Narrator] Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann,
and Paul Dillenberger collectively decided
to remove the "OREGON" game
from the Minnesota public school's high-priced,
mainframe computer.
They printed off copies of the game's code
then deleted the program.
They jokingly referred to their pages of programming
as "sacred scrolls."
After completing their student teaching,
the three friends headed back to Carleton College
to finish their final semester.
The "OREGON" game was officially unplayable
for now.
(audience applauding)
In the spring of 1972,
Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger
were preparing to graduate from Carleton College.
But the feeling was not all sunshine and rainbows.
A war loomed over their heads.
(light rock music) (helicopter rotors whirring)
(explosions blasting)
Since 1965, the United States military
had been fighting in the Vietnam War.
And as the conflict dragged on,
the American public's support for the war dwindled.
- [News Reporter] We're on the outskirts of-
- [Narrator] It was one of the first conflicts seen at home,
images and videos were broadcast to televisions
across the country,
and the soldiers who made it home were often traumatized
by what they experienced.
- When I was a freshman,
there were a lot of protests on campus
over the war in Vietnam.
I did meet with some of them.
I had similar ideas to some of the hippie-type people
that normally I wouldn't have associated with at all.
But they were opposed mostly on the grounds
that this was not a just war.
- The Vietnam War, I was very much against the war.
I couldn't even imagine myself shooting at anybody
or anything like that.
My situation, they had a draft lottery
where you got numbers from one to 365
depending on your birthday.
And my number...
I remember sitting there watching them pulling the numbers,
and my number was 33, which was pretty low out of 365,
and I was sure to go.
And I was on a student deferment.
That fall that we wrote the program,
I went home for the holidays at wintertime,
and my mother said to me, "You know,
"you might be interested in this newspaper article."
So, I started reading it.
And evidently, the selective service system
expired that year
and so they got a temporary law in to extend it to March 31.
And they said, "Well, if you declare yourself 1-A,"
like fit to go, "before December 31..."
And since the year is extended to March 31,
if they don't call you by March 31,
then you go on to the next category, which is 1-H.
Which means that they have to go through all 365 numbers
before they would even think about getting to you.
I knew that if I didn't do that,
I would get drafted in June.
It was my senior year, no more student deferment.
I dropped my 2-S, my student deferment.
I sweated it out, January, February, March,
and April 1 came, and I got my 1-H card,
and I didn't have to go.
So, thank you to my mother. (chuckles)
- We were kind of listening to the radio all night long,
and they would announce a few numbers at a time.
And we thought, "Oh, boy, it's getting up.
"We haven't been called.
"We're gonna be one of the last ones to go."
It got up to around 340.
But it turned out that I was around 345 or something,
and my roommate was 365, so we never got called.
(gentle thoughtful music)
- [Narrator] Don Rawitsch was also against the Vietnam War.
As a freshman, he assumed the war would end
by the time he graduated from Carleton College.
But now, Rawitsch faced a harsh reality:
His number had been called in the draft lottery.
So, Rawitsch declared himself a conscientious objector.
He laid out his reasons for opposing the war
and collected letters of support from fellow students
and friends back home.
The local draft board accepted his proposal.
As an alternative to serving in the military,
Rawitsch had to find a job that was in the public interest.
Through a connection from a Carleton College professor,
Rawitsch met with a man named Dale LaFrenz.
LaFrenz had a background as a math teacher,
but he was also on the ground floor
of the computer revolution in Minnesota education.
He helped launch and grow
the Minnesota TIES computer project
and worked with Honeywell
to implement instructional time-sharing systems in schools.
But now, LaFrenz was doing consulting work.
The Minneapolis public school system
was conducting a research project,
studying different models of instruction
through various local schools.
LaFrenz met with Rawitsch
to see if he would be a good fit for the project.
He found the young man "bright, energetic, smart.
"He was a nerd before the word was around."
So, LaFrenz hired Rawitsch to collect data,
write up reports, and help analyze outcomes.
The research project lasted two years,
ending in June of 1974.
By then, the United States' involvement
in the Vietnam War was over.
With his public service requirement fulfilled,
Rawitsch looked for teaching jobs.
Unfortunately, he couldn't find any.
He went back to his old boss, Dale LaFrenz,
to see if he had any suggestions.
Rawitsch was in luck.
(bright acoustic music)
A few years earlier, Minnesota Governor Harold LeVander
noted that the state's computing expenses
were out of control.
In order to bring costs down and increase efficiency,
five agencies, including the University of Minnesota
and the State Department of Education, came together to form
the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium,
also known as MECC.
According to LaFrenz, "MECC had only one thing to do in life
"and that was computing services for education."
- Basically, it was a state-funded program,
so that computing wouldn't just happen in the cities,
but would happen in the rural areas of Minnesota
or little towns and so forth.
They wanted computing to be accessible to all of Minnesota.
- [Narrator] LaFrenz had been hired
as the assistant director of this new organization
and was looking for help,
so, in October of 1974,
Don Rawitsch got a job with MECC.
According to Rawitsch, it was an exciting time.
He said, "We were the first wave of people working
"in the educational computing business."
There was nothing else like it in the world.
MECC held workshops to get teachers comfortable
using computers in the classroom.
They created a software library
accessible to every school across the state.
They bought teletype terminals in bulk
and resold them to schools at a steep discount.
MECC even helped with infrastructure,
they collaborated with telephone companies
to help bring down the costs of rural schools
connecting to the network.
Before MECC, only 14% of students
outside of the Twin Cities area had access to computers.
By 1975, that number had tripled to 46%.
When Rawitsch first arrived,
co-workers showed him the collection
of educational computer programs available to schools.
(bright thoughtful music)
- There wasn't a lot.
In those days, the math departments
really were in charge of the computers.
There were, like, math games on it,
you know, it could ask math problems and things like that.
- [Narrator] Rawitsch noticed there was a severe lack
of social studies programs.
And that's when he remembered "OREGON,"
it could make a great addition to the MECC software library.
When he asked his superiors
if he could add software to the library,
they replied, "Yes, as many as we can find."
(computer keyboard clicking)
So over the 1974 Thanksgiving break,
Don Rawitsch took home a teletype and re-typed "OREGON"
from his printed-off copy of the game's code.
But he didn't stop there, he also made updates to the game.
According to Rawitsch, he got a, quote,
"crash course in programming."
- So he cleaned it up so it was a lot more accurate.
And I know he did a lot of research.
He read a lot of the diaries of settlers
that took the trail to Oregon.
He got more realistic probabilities.
I mean, when we first wrote the program,
we were guessing in a lot of it,
and he was able to find out more about, you know,
how likely you were to die or get sick
or something to happen.
- [Narrator] But some changes required
some additional programming expertise.
For that, Rawitsch turned to his old friend,
Bill Heinemann, for help.
- I remember him asking me
if I'd be willing to make some changes to the program.
And I said, "Sure, that sounds like fun."
Don soon discovered that kids will try to stretch
the possibility (chuckles) of answering questions.
So when it said, "How much do you wanna spend
"on your clothing?"
they figured out they could enter a negative amount in there
and essentially, get money back.
So they'd enter a negative real high number,
and they'd get tons of money,
which they would buy tons of bullets,
and tons of food and whatever.
So that was an easy fix
just to make sure that the number was positive.
If it was negative, it would say, "You can't do that,"
and it would loop back and ask the question again.
- [Narrator] Later, Heinemann also updated
the hunting mini-game.
- Kids soon learned
that "Oh, we're gonna have to type 'bang.'"
And they would get their fingers set on the keys
for typing "bang,"
and then they would say, "Okay, somebody press return now,"
'cause they didn't wanna take their fingers off
to press return.
On the scroll here, I've got my pencil scratches on the back
that has four choices:
Blam, wham, pow, or bang.
So they didn't know what was gonna come up,
so they couldn't get their fingers on the keys
and just wait until somebody pressed enter,
they had to actually read what came out.
When you're doing it quickly,
you don't always think of doing devious things
like the kids think of.
(light upbeat folk music)
- [Narrator] In 1975, the updated version of "OREGON"
was made available to Minnesota schools statewide.
Rawitsch also wrote up a teacher's guide.
It not only explained how the game worked,
but provided learning outcomes, historical documentation,
suggested readings,
and ideas for integrating the game into the curriculum.
Once again, "OREGON" was a hit with students.
For the next five years,
it was the most-run program on the MECC software library.
- When I was hired in Minneapolis,
I then had access to the game.
And I managed to include it in my math classes,
sometimes as just a reward.
So I was fond of it, fond of the game.
- I got a job at UNIVAC.
And interestingly enough, it was while I was at UNIVAC
that UNIVAC put in a bid for the mainframe
to run the TIES system or the MECC system.
I wasn't on the project, but one of my coworkers was,
and he was saying that he couldn't figure it out.
There's this one program that's using up all the resources.
I said, "Let me guess: 'Oregon Trail.'"
He says, "Yes. How did you know?"
I said, "I wrote that.
He said, "Well, what in the world is it doing?
"It runs all day long, every day.
"It never stops."
No, he was not impressed.
- [Narrator] With the game taking off across Minnesota,
Rawitsch wanted to share "OREGON"
with the rest of the world,
so with permission from Bill Heinemann
and Paul Dillenberger,
Rawitsch submitted the game for publication
in a popular computer magazine.
And with it, came a new name,
popularized by the students who played it: 'Oregon Trail.'
(bright acoustic music)
- Creative Computing asked for permission to print the code
in their magazine, which was a hobbyist's magazine.
At the time, there was no such thing
as software that could be purchased.
So they printed out 10 pages of code or something
in a magazine, and you could type it out.
And as long as you didn't put a period
where there was supposed to be a comma,
and got every parentheses, (laughs)
every number exactly right, it would work.
But we gave them permission.
I realized at the time
that, "Okay, I'm giving them permission to do this.
"It's public domain software now.
"I won't get a penny from it ever,
"but it'll spread like wildfire."
- [Narrator] But it wasn't until the introduction
of a revolutionary new piece of technology
that "Oregon Trail" would truly begin
its cross-country journey.
(gentle contemplative synth music)
- [Dale Narrator] "One of MECC's instructional coordinators
"went to California and came back saying,
"'You know, I went out to this conference in California,
"'and I saw a little thing about so big,
"'about the size of a small box,
"'that does everything that huge computer
"'out there on the floor does except it does it in color.'
"He was talking about the Apple II microcomputer."
Dale LaFrenz.
- [Narrator] In 1977,
Apple introduced a new personal computer,
often called microcomputers.
It was aimed at the everyday consumer.
They called it the Apple II.
For around $1,200, a user could have a computer
that fit on a desk in their very own home.
And Apple wasn't alone.
That same year, Commodore released the PET,
while Tandy RadioShack offered the TRS-80.
It was the beginning of a new era in the computer industry.
MECC quickly took notice.
They recognized that the affordability
and power of a microcomputer
would make it a great addition to the classroom,
and would allow them to slowly phase out their large,
expensive telecommunication network.
MECC decided to set up a statewide purchasing contract
for one particular microcomputer brand.
So, they solicited bids from multiple hardware vendors,
but Apple had the winning offer.
Between 1978 and 1979,
MECC sold more than 500 Apple II computers
to Minnesota schools
and became one of Apple's largest hardware dealers.
Other states followed MECC's lead
and acquired Apple II computers for their own schools.
The microcomputer industry boomed.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, would later claim
that "One of the things that built Apple IIs
"was schools buying Apple IIs."
The rise of personal computers was also good news for MECC,
thanks to their growing educational software library.
As schools in other states acquired computers,
they turned to MECC for educational software.
So, the organization converted their software library,
written in BASIC, to Apple II BASIC,
and sold the games on disks.
"Oregon Trail," their most popular title,
was one of the first games they converted.
- So this original Apple II version
was primarily a port of the original text-only game,
but it was no longer 100% text.
It was mostly text,
but the main difference from the original
was that the shooting activity
had been put into a graphical context.
So, if you were hunting for food,
a little deer slowly moved across the screen,
and you could press space bar to shoot at it.
You could be attacked by wolves in this game,
or you could be attacked by bandits,
or you could be attacked by what they called hostile riders.
And you could shoot at any of these, too.
Otherwise, the game was pretty much a direct port
from the original timeshare version that Don Rawitsch
and his colleagues had created,
with a few small tweaks here and there that were important.
- [Narrator] MECC's conversion team worked their way
through the back catalog of software
and began offering software compilations to schools.
"Oregon Trail" became one of five titles
in the "Elementary Volume 6" social studies collection.
MECC sold these disks to schools around the country.
They even offered them for sale to consumers,
through magazines like Creative Computing.
- But after MECC started producing these Apple II disks,
there was the potential for them being used
outside the state.
We started getting inquiries from other places,
particularly from Iowa.
Iowa wanted to be able just to license all of the MECC disks
at once for the Apple II.
This led to a new business model,
where MECC was no longer relying entirely on state funding,
but was getting an income stream
by selling the product outside of the state
to other individual school districts
or entire states as a site license.
For a school or a district that got a site license,
they would pay an annual fee,
and they could make unlimited copies of MECC software
for its own use during those 12 months.
- [Narrator] Thanks to software licensing and sales,
MECC made a lot of money.
So much so, in fact, that the higher-ups at MECC
made a proposition to the state.
MECC proposed that they would turn themselves
into a company, wholly owned by the state of Minnesota.
This would remove all government subsidies,
but allow MECC to hire more staff
without strict government regulations.
They could offer bonuses, commissions,
higher salaries, and more.
In addition, MECC would still provide hardware
and software at a steep discount to Minnesota schools.
All of these changes would help MECC compete
in the fast-growing software business.
In 1984, the Minnesota state legislature
approved the measure, and MECC became known
as the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation.
Dale LaFrenz, who was now the vice president
of marketing at MECC,
was ready to lead the company into new territory,
the home consumer market.
And for their first wave of retail products,
one title stood out above the rest:
"Oregon Trail."
- There were two primary reasons
that MECC decided finally, in 1984,
to create a new version of "The Oregon Trail."
The first reason was that the product was now out of date.
The world had really changed a lot in four years.
Products that were appearing on the market in 1984
looked so much better than the ones in 1980.
They were also being created by teams
of professional programmers, teams of professional artists,
teams of professional educational designers.
But MECC had a second reason
that was even more motivating for the management.
MECC was one of the biggest players in the school market
but had yet to have any real success in the home market,
and they figured that "Oregon Trail"
was their best opportunity,
but it would have to be a brand-new version
of "The Oregon Trail."
It couldn't be the old one.
So, that was my mandate.
(light thoughtful music)
- [Narrator] In October of 1984,
MECC tasked Philip Bouchard,
a full-time programmer on staff,
to create an updated version of "Oregon Trail"
for the home market.
Bouchard had been at MECC since May of 1981.
During his first few years on the job,
he witnessed the meteoric rise of the software industry.
- And when I first started at MECC,
the microcomputer group was really tiny.
We had about five full-time people in that group.
As MECC grew, the microcomputer software group
got bigger and bigger,
and I started working for more different kinds of computers.
Not just Apple IIs, but a variety of other ones,
like the Ataris and Commodores, and so on.
The rest of the company started shrinking and shrinking.
The timeshare system was shut down.
Pretty soon, MECC was all about
creating educational computer software.
- [Narrator] Now, Bouchard was in charge of updating MECC's
most popular game.
Upper management was mostly hands-off on the project,
but they did have three requirements for the new game.
First, Bouchard had to preserve
what made the original game so popular.
- I was aware of "OREGON" before I even got to MECC.
I didn't get to play the game, though,
until I arrived in Minnesota.
I thought they were exciting.
I thought they were innovative.
But I also saw opportunities for improvement
and opportunities for growth.
And I thought, "There's more we can do here."
- [Narrator] Second,
the game had to appeal to the home market.
- Now, I was told not to worry about the school market.
I did.
I decided, "I wanna create a product that can go both ways.
"Let's look for the ideas that have the most potential
"for being both entertaining and educational,
"and let's emphasize those ideas."
- [Narrator] And finally,
the game had to be built for the Apple II computer.
- So that was a big challenge.
The Apple II has got this tiny little 64K RAM.
It's got these tiny little floppy disks
that hold 128K or something.
How do we get it to all fit?
- [Narrator] With those objectives,
Bouchard assembled his team.
- There were five of us, at first.
So I was the team leader and lead designer.
Shirley Keran was an experienced teacher.
She also ended up writing all the manuals.
John Krenz was named the lead programmer.
Charolyn Kapplinger was the lead graphic designer.
That meant she did virtually all of the artwork
that appears in the product.
And then, finally, we had, Bob Granvin,
who assisted with programming,
and he created the first prototype
that we did for the hunting game.
So, at the time that our team
first got started on "The Oregon Trail,"
I was very interested in speaking with Don Rawitsch.
He was still on staff,
so I went over to his office and spoke with him.
I wanted to get his take on,
well, what did he think about this?
What were his thoughts as to where it might go?
Would he like to be involved in weekly meetings?
He kind of demurred.
He said, you know,
he wanted to really respect the boundaries
between the different divisions of MECC,
and since he wasn't in the software division,
he was just gonna stand back and let us take it over.
But he said, "You know, I think you've got a good team.
"I think you're gonna do a great job, so I'm not worried."
(light folk music)
- [Narrator] To begin, Bouchard and his team got feedback
from their target demographic, children.
They wanted to know what made "Oregon Trail" so special.
- "Why do you like 'The Oregon Trail?'
"What is it that most appeals to you?"
And the boys would enthusiastically answer,
"Hunting, hunting! We like hunting!"
That was the universal answer.
Girls, interestingly,
we found that half the girls didn't much care for the game,
and half of them did.
Then, when we started observing the kids playing,
we could see it wasn't just the shooting
that was attracting them,
2/3 of the kids actually cared about getting to Oregon.
So we could see that the resource management aspect
was a key part.
Making sure that you kept an eye on your supplies,
that at no time you allowed anything to run out
because that would be certain death in that game.
The other thing was the fact
that after every two-week period,
some random thing would happen that was usually bad,
and it kind of kept them on the edge of their seats.
Like, "What's gonna happen this time?
"What's gonna happen this time?"
So those two aspects turned out to be
what I thought were also crucial.
This goal of surviving all the way to Oregon,
watching your resources,
and wondering what's gonna happen on the way.
- [Narrator] With the feedback,
Bouchard envisioned a new foundation for the game.
- The original game was based on a two-week structure
where two weeks would pass, couple of things would happen,
two weeks would pass, and so on.
This particular structure did not facilitate
the inclusion of any actual geography
because you couldn't know where you would be
at the end of these two weeks.
I wanted a game that was heavily based on geography.
I wanted it to be as much geography as history.
This ended up being the idea
of going from a landmark to landmark.
That I would include a bunch of different
landmarks along the way,
dividing the trail to about 16 segments
each ending in a landmark.
And once I presented this idea
of a landmark-based game structure to the team,
the team all bought into it.
Shirley and I, we both started coming up
with lists of different things
that people would anticipate along the way.
There were forts, of course.
There were a lot of different river crossings.
But there was a lot of geographical features
that people would anticipate,
like Chimney Rock being the most famous.
But there was still an issue because I wanted the player
to be able to react immediately if they ran out of food
or something happened.
I wanted things to be able to happen between landmarks.
So the first step in solving that problem
was that in addition to the landmark-to-landmark cycle,
I had a daily cycle going underneath it,
and all of the formulas would be recomputed every day:
How much food do you have left?
What is the current health of every member of your party?
What's the current weather on this particular date?
But the next problem was now I had
150 possible stopping points along the trail,
that's too many times to ask the person,
"What do you wanna do now?"
Finally, came up with this idea,
"Well, what if from landmark to landmark,
"it just goes on its own?"
It goes day after day,
all the data's up there on the screen.
You can see all these different variables changing:
Your health, how many miles are left,
how much food you have, and so on.
But anytime you can stop it
and then take an action at that point,
but you aren't forced to add answer every single day,
"What do you wanna do next?"
- [Narrator] The new system simulated a day-to-day journey
along the Oregon Trail.
Bouchard and Shirley Keran also expanded on random events
that could happen daily along the trail.
A thief could steal supplies,
or a member of the wagon party might break their arm.
Some occurrences were positive,
such as stumbling upon wild fruit.
It made the journey more exciting
and kept players on their toes.
Still, Bouchard felt like things
were simply happening to the player in the game.
He wanted to give people more agency
on their journey to Oregon.
- In the original game, as compelling as it was,
there wasn't that much opportunity for decision-making.
Basically, each two-week period you decided,
"Do I want to hunt or not?"
and, "How much am I gonna eat?"
Otherwise, there was mostly things happening to you.
In the new product, I wanted to take that great beginning
and expand it.
Give the users lots more opportunities,
lots more decision-making potential.
Part of that was including additional resources,
additional things that they could decide
in terms of how resources were being used.
Spare parts is one thing.
So, three different categories of spare parts.
Because as I was reading, doing the research,
I saw how often things broke down on the trail,
which could sometimes be fixed, sometimes not.
- [Narrator] Bouchard also gave players
more things to do while traveling.
They could set their pace, attempt to trade for resources,
or rest for a few days to recover from injuries.
But one player decision became a tense experience:
River crossings.
(light gentle acoustic music)
- River crossings didn't occur
in the original product at all.
These are based on an actual river you had to cross.
And these rivers differed in their conditions.
They differed in how wide they were and the average depth.
And during the course of a year,
a river could change the depth of water in it.
Some had ferries available, some did not.
Some had helpful Native Americans who could,
for a fee, help you across, some didn't have that.
So, there were a lot of variables
we could incorporate into this.
What a wonderful opportunity.
Let's include this in the game where you have to decide
how are you gonna cross.
The kids really loved it.
But once we put in the animations,
it became a nail-biting experience.
You can see you've made your decision,
you're starting across the river, and now you're waiting:
"Am I gonna make it? Am I gonna make it?"
And then halfway across, the wagon turns over,
or it gets all the way across to the far shore.
So it's a very exciting aspect of the game,
as well as being an important historical
educational opportunity.
- [Narrator] But for many kids,
the most exciting part of "Oregon Trail"
was still the hunting.
Bouchard wanted to ensure they got it right.
- In the original,
the shooting activities were very popular.
And that included not just hunting for food,
but also shooting at attacking animals, like wolves,
shooting at attacking people.
Quite a bit of shooting in the original game.
For the new game,
I decided to narrow that down just to the hunting.
In part because for my research,
I couldn't find any evidence of actual attacks
by wild animals on the trail,
and nor were frontal attacks by bandits or Native Americans
anything that occurred with any frequency whatsoever.
Then I wanted to make this game similar
to a genuine arcade-style game
like you might find on Apple II,
if you bought an arcade-style game,
or if you went to an actual arcade
and played an arcade game.
I wanted it to feel a lot like that.
I worked with John Krenz and Bob Granvin,
two of my teammates.
The three of us got together
and brainstormed hunting idea games.
Bob created a little prototype
that illustrated our concepts.
The problem, though, was that it
couldn't be done in Applesoft BASIC.
It would've required assembly language programming,
which is a bit more, well, considerably more involved.
It requires a specialist programmer.
But eventually, my boss gave me permission to do this,
and we brought in another teammate, Roger Shimada,
specifically to program this hunting game.
When Roger first programmed the game,
we didn't have the dead animals graphics ready yet.
At his first cut of programming it,
he just flipped the graphic upside down
to show that the animal had been shot
as a temporary measure.
Well, it was so cute.
We liked that.
But we went ahead and put in the dead animal graphics,
that when you shot, it just collapsed into a lump.
That wasn't nearly as effective.
It turned out that it was far more effective
just to flip the animal upside down,
and it made for a more entertaining game,
and it clearly communicated what happened.
- [Narrator] With all of the updates,
"The Oregon Trail" game became more and more interactive.
(gentle acoustic folk music)
But Bouchard couldn't forget
that the game was also meant to teach students
about the people who made the journey
and the hardships they experienced.
- So, in the original game,
one of the things that really caught my attention
was that it almost gave the illusion
that you were alone on the trail.
Mentions of other people were very rare,
I said, "I wanna be able to have
"other people in this wagon."
It's you and these other people,
probably your family members.
Came up with this idea, "Why don't we name these people?"
You, as the player not only provide your own name,
you provide the name of these other five people,
and then things can happen
to the individual people on the wagon.
Sickness was a real problem on the Oregon Trail.
A lot of people got sick along the way.
Sickness and accidents were quite common
and were, of course, the main causes of death.
I did research on what diseases people mentioned most often
using the terminology that they used.
And I found the six that were mentioned most often,
I took those six and put them into the game.
All six are equally probable.
I didn't make one more probable than the other.
This worked exceedingly well.
We could watch the kids,
they would almost always first time they played,
put in the names of their siblings, their family members.
And now they were in charge of the wagon,
it became very personal for a lot of them,
and really motivated them to try harder the next time.
But I wanted to have the opportunity
to meet other people along the way, too.
Some of these people would be other immigrants
who may be in different wagons.
Or they could be soldiers or traders or trappers
who were at a particular fort or other landmark.
It could be Native Americans who lived in the area
or had come to the area to do trading.
This varied humanity,
I wanted you to be able to interact with them
and hear their stories.
- [Narrator] If players managed to make it
to the last part of the journey, at The Dalles landmark,
they were in for one more surprise:
A choice on which route to take.
- One was to raft down the Columbia River,
and the other one was to take the Barlow Toll Road,
which was a very rugged toll road through the mountains.
And this is the reality.
This is the actual reality
that the travelers on the trail faced.
I wanted the game to have kind of a big finale.
So to make this a big finale,
I wanted to have a rafting game
where you raft down the river and had to survive,
and to take the Barlow Toll Road,
I was envisioning some other game.
If I want to meet the needs of different students
with different game-playing styles, I'll have a puzzle game.
So how about a puzzle game
in which you are trying to get your wagon
up a big mountain and down the other side?
Which is absolutely true.
And they were on the Barlow Toll Road
using ropes, levers, pulleys.
Again, absolutely true.
And this would be a fantastic opportunity here.
- [Narrator] But due to time and technical constraints,
both games had to be modified or removed altogether.
- So, I got permission, finally, to do a really simple,
stripped-down version of the rafting game.
Much simpler than before.
But at least it got in.
But the Barlow Toll Road,
it operated in the same way as the rest of the game.
We never got in the game about the puzzle game
with the ropes, levers, and pulleys.
- [Narrator] If players managed to survive the rafting
or the toll road, they made it to Oregon, beating the game.
- But then, when the player got that far,
all of a sudden we revealed
that there was a scoring system underneath this.
It had been hidden until they arrived,
and they could see that they had made a high score list
and that there were other names already on that list
higher than them.
So, now, all of a sudden, there was a new motivating factor.
Because I was creating this product for the home market,
and I needed to have all kinds of different ways
to get people to keep playing it again,
I wanted to go a step further still
and give you three different difficulty levels.
It's so much easier to play
when you can start with a lot of money.
Ultimately, it ended up being presented as
"Do you want to be a banker, a carpenter, or a farmer?"
The implication was that each one
came with a different amount of money.
- [Narrator] If players couldn't complete the journey,
they were given the option to write out their tombstone,
a fun, yet grim, way to show a game over screen.
- So the tombstone idea came up rather late in the project.
The door had already closed in our being able to put
many more new ideas into it.
We were, instead, throwing out ideas.
I think it was Shirley,
Shirley Keran, one of our team members,
who brought up the idea in the meeting.
She had been reading about
how people often pass grave sites,
and she was wondering if we might be able to include that
in the product somehow.
We had this idea, "Well, what if,
"after your entire party dies,
"you can write your own tombstone?"
This tombstone that you write would be stored on the disk,
and then, the next time you played that same game,
you could see where you had last died
by seeing your old tombstone.
Or in a school environment,
where many kids might be using the same disk,
the next kid to use that disk
could see the tombstone of the previous player
if they got as far as that other player had gotten.
And kids loved it.
It was a big success.
And one of the nice things about it
was that if you die on the way,
you might feel disappointed in having failed to make it,
this was a bit of a little boost:
"Okay, well, I didn't make it Oregon,
"but at least I got to have a little bit of fun
"writing the tombstone."
- [Narrator] By February of 1985,
six months after development began,
the team was finally ready to start testing
an early build of the game.
- We decided to test at a school.
We went to a sixth-grade classroom.
It was basically a one-hour test
with each of the groups of kids that we worked with.
We paired them up on the computers.
I would tell them,
"We have this product that's not finished yet,
"and you guys are gonna help us
"find out what's working, what's not working."
So we found that they really liked the game.
There were a lot of things they did successfully,
but they were bored by the main travel screen.
(light thoughtful music) (computer beeps)
Now, the purpose of the travel screen
is to show time passing.
That's where you're going from one landmark to another,
and the days are going by, clicking by,
the data's changing on the screen.
Kids were not interested
in just looking at boxes of data changing.
Got the team together and said,
"Let's think of some radical ideas.
"What's something different
"that would keep the students engaged?"
While we were doing this brainstorming,
another person who wasn't even on our team,
a programmer named Bill Way,
who was well known for his ability
to do cute little animations,
he walked up, and he said, "Why don't you include
"a little animation of an ox pulling a wagon?"
"Yeah. Yeah, we should try that.
"Don't know if it'll work, but let's try.
"Let's try building a whole screen around this."
So we used that as the centerpiece of the screen
and built a whole new travel screen around it.
It was great.
It worked very well.
They paid a lot of attention to that screen.
Now, they paid more attention to the animation
than to the numbers,
but they paid some attention to the numbers,
and they were very engaged.
And interestingly,
that became the most famous screen of the product.
So thanks, Bill, for giving us that idea. (laughing)
- [Narrator] Thanks to their testing,
the development team also found a potential major problem
with the tombstones.
As Bill Heinemann had learned from the original game,
during development, sometimes you don't think
about the devious things kids will do.
- We sent out these beta copies of the product
to various schools in Minnesota for them to try out
and let us know what they liked, what they didn't like,
what were the issues, what worked, what worked well.
And one teacher wrote back and said,
"Oh, my goodness, your disk has got profanity on it.
"One of your QA testers
"must have put profanity on the tombstone."
Uh-oh!
So we quickly checked all the copies of the disks.
No, there was no profanity.
There wasn't even a tombstone.
So, I reported back to her and said,
"I'm afraid it was your own students
"that did the profanity on the tombstones."
Said, "No way!
"My students would never do that."
But regardless, I realized that we had a problem now
'cause it probably was going to happen
in other classrooms, as well.
So finally, "Okay, we are going to add
"another part to the teacher interface."
There was a hidden teacher interface on there
in which you can reset the high score list,
"We'll allow them to reset the tombstone, too."
So you can just blow the tombstones away,
and then any profanity, of course, will go away.
- [Narrator] A final bug check,
which included a company-wide contest
to find the best issues in exchange for cash prizes,
solidified everything.
10 months after development started,
the game was finally ready.
(upbeat acoustic folk music)
In July of 1985,
MECC released their new version of "Oregon Trail"
for the Apple II.
- [Rawson Narrator] "On this 2,000-mile,
"six-month journey to the west,
"there were no Gulf service stations, Holiday Inns,
"or Dairy Queens.
"All that travelers had to anticipate were landmarks,
"102 miles to the Kansas River crossing,
"83 miles to the Big Blue River crossing,
"119 miles to Fort Kearney, 250 miles to Chimney Rock.
"Carcasses of dead oxen and mules, discarded belongings,
"shallow graves, and the ruts of previous wagon wheels
"marked the way.
"That's the setting for 'The Oregon Trail,'
"a simulation/discovery game for Apple II computers,
"from The Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation.
"It's my favorite type of educational game.
"While playing it, I got so wrapped up in the events,
"that I began to feel as if I were really making the trip."
Rawson Stovall.
- [Narrator] "Oregon Trail" was an absolute hit,
with students, parents, and teachers.
But among all the praise and fanfare,
there was a controversy.
MECC chose to not include the new version of "Oregon Trail"
in their site licensing package for schools.
- This led to a revolt.
All of our customers, our main source of income
was all these site license holders who were in other states,
who were buying our entire collection each year.
And they said, "How dare you create
"a new version of 'The Oregon Trail'
"and not include it in the site license."
And MECC said, "Okay, we'll do a school version of it,
"but you'll have to buy individual copies.
"It won't be part of the site license."
So we created the school version,
which is actually the same product,
has a different manual and different packaging.
And, "Nope, that's not good enough.
"We want to include this in the site license.
"We're paying you a lot of money every year
"to get all your products,
"we want 'Oregon Trail' in there, too."
So MECC agreed, and it was included in the site license.
Once it did, there were copies all over North America.
This was really crucial
because suddenly it became very well known.
Everybody was seeing the game.
It also turned out to be crucial
to success in the home market.
Rather than trying to sell this thing through advertising,
kids learned about the game in school, loved it,
and then asked their parents to buy the home market version.
And then we started getting letters from teachers
saying how much they loved it
and how much they liked playing it on their own
when the students weren't around.
By that point, I realized, "Okay, this is a big hit.
"This is going very well."
- [Narrator] But for Philip Bouchard,
the greatest compliment didn't come from the press
or teachers, it came from his family.
(gentle mid-tempo acoustic music)
- Well, not long after the game came out in 1985,
we drove down to Georgia to see my dad, my sister,
and my siblings.
And I brought with me an Apple II computer,
and I brought this newly released "Oregon Trail" game.
I set up the Apple II computer,
and I spent a few minutes showing it to my family:
"Look at this cool new game we did."
Now, to my surprise, my dad decided he wanted to play it.
He didn't make it to Oregon on the first try,
so he tried again.
Once he got to Oregon,
he saw that there was a high score list
and that he was near the bottom of the high score list.
Well, my dad was always very competitive,
so he said, "Well, I have to get higher on this list."
So during this week as we were visiting,
I hardly saw my dad.
He was all the time on the Apple II computer,
playing "Oregon Trail" over and over.
And finally, just before it was time to go back,
he said, "All right, I've done it.
"I'm the highest name on the list now.
"I've beaten Stephen Meek.
"You can take your Apple II computer back now."
And to the best of my knowledge, that is the only time
my dad ever played a computer game. (laughing)
(gentle acoustic folk music)
- [Narrator] With the overwhelming success
of "Oregon Trail,"
MECC continued to release new products on the Apple II,
including "Number Munchers" and "Word Munchers."
But among the more than 300 software titles MECC released,
"Oregon Trail" was always their best seller.
The game was so popular,
the Shingakusha Summit Software company took a chance
and licensed the game for a Japanese release.
In the United States,
"Oregon Trail" became a cultural phenomenon,
thanks in no small part to its daily use
in classrooms across the country.
Anyone who grew up in the '80s and '90s
most likely played some version of the game in school.
- I remember when I went to my track meet
that my daughter was running in Oregon.
I went out there to watch her her senior year,
and there were a bunch of other girls
on the track team there.
Suddenly, there was this commotion
and they all came running over to me
and said, "Did you write for 'Oregon Trail,' really?"
They had thought that it was only people in Oregon
that played "Oregon Trail."
I guess when I realized
that just out of a random group of collection of kids
on a track team, that they had all played "Oregon Trail,"
and they all thought it was great,
maybe this was a little more pervasive in society
than I had even imagined up to that point.
- But the kids are impressed.
Just the other day I was in a class
and he says, "You're the 'Oregon Trail' guy, right?"
You know, I don't know what it is,
but I had no idea that it would have
such an expansive audience of people who played it.
It's like to touch that many people is humbling (laughs)
in that way,
even though the game is quite different from the original.
- I thought this product would reach a peak of popularity
maybe two years and then kind of fade away.
I certainly never anticipated
talking about the product 35 years later.
- [Narrator] "Oregon Trail's" success
allowed MECC to dominate the school software market.
But in the retail world, things were different.
While the Apple II was the primary personal computer
used in schools, at home, other platforms reigned supreme.
There were more and more options available to consumers,
and prices were coming down.
The Apple II was also beginning to show its age.
It was only a matter of time
before schools upgraded to new computers.
In order to compete,
MECC had to start porting their games to other platforms.
In 1990, five years after the Apple II release,
MECC finally ported "Oregon Trail"
and other popular titles to new platforms, such as MS-DOS.
But it seemed too little, too late.
Dale LaFrenz, who was now the president and CEO of MECC,
admitted that the company was, quote,
"going to get eaten alive."
It needed investment capital to develop new titles,
port more games to other platforms,
and expand their distribution.
But the state of Minnesota couldn't provide
any additional funding and decided to sell the company.
In 1991, a venture capital group
called North American Fund II bought MECC for $5.25 million.
Three years later, in March of 1994, MECC went public
and raised more than $22 million.
It was a huge success.
"Oregon Trail" continued to be a money-maker for MECC.
The company worked on sequels
and spin-off games that featured the same concepts,
such as "Amazon Trail."
At one point, "Oregon Trail" games
accounted for 33% of MECC's revenue.
Meanwhile, the original creators of "Oregon Trail,"
Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger,
never made a penny off the game.
- [Don Narrator] "When you're an educator,
"you're encouraged to write and publish.
"Paul and Bill and I, when you get right down to it,
"we were teachers.
"We have the teacher mentality.
"And so, to get rich off this would have been nice,
"but not as important as having donated something
"to the world of education."
Don Rawitsch.
- If we had started out as entrepreneurs
and we wanted to write something and try to sell it,
make money, that's one thing,
but that's not what we were about.
We were always about good teaching,
and there was no expectation that it would go beyond that.
- Nobody knew anything about software.
There were no people to sell it to.
Think people sometimes forget
that that was a very different world then,
with no screens, just teletypes,
and very few people were even
acquainted with computers at all.
It really wasn't much of a possibility.
(light jaunty acoustic music)
- [Narrator] But in February of 1995,
the original creators of the game
finally got some recognition.
To celebrate the release of "Oregon Trail II,"
MECC threw an "Oregon Trail"-themed celebration
at the Mall of America.
They invited Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann,
and Paul Dillenberger as special guests.
It was the first time they were recognized
for their creation of the game.
- We were acknowledged as the original writers,
creators of the program.
We were invited to come, and we were given jean jackets
which said "Trailhead" on the back.
And we were given copies of the CD-ROM,
the latest CD-ROM of the game.
- And that's the only thing that I ever received
from "Oregon Trail," was the game and the jacket.
- [Narrator] Eight months later,
MECC was acquired by SoftKey for $370 million.
(light pulsing electronic music)
SoftKey, founded by Kevin O'Leary,
was on an acquisition spree
of educational software companies.
It also bought The Learning Company,
makers of the popular "Reader Rabbit" series.
After the purchase,
SoftKey changed its name to The Learning Company
and used it on all of their products,
including "Oregon Trail."
Three years later, the company purchased Broderbund,
makers of the "Carmen Sandiego" games.
After all of the mergers,
The Learning Company became the second largest
independent consumer software company,
behind only Microsoft.
Meanwhile, the MECC offices in Minnesota
continued developing games for The Learning Company.
But in 1999, everything changed.
Kevin O'Leary finalized the sale of The Learning Company
to toy giant Mattel
for an astonishing $3.8 billion in stock.
He would stay on as president
of a new software division at the company.
Mattel hoped the purchase would add $50 million
to its quarterly profits.
But Mattel grossly overvalued The Learning Company,
seemingly ignoring its aging games and declining sales.
Instead of adding profit, Mattel lost $105 million
in the third quarter of 1999.
In the fourth quarter, they lost another $184 million.
Kevin O'Leary cashed out his stocks
and was subsequently fired.
As a result of the financial losses,
Mattel permanently closed the MECC offices in Minnesota.
Later, Businessweek
would call Mattel's purchase of The Learning Company
one of the worst business deals of all time.
Meanwhile, the people who created "The Oregon Trail" games
went on with their lives.
In 1990, Don Rawitsch left MECC
and continued his career
in the educational technology sector.
He worked for Jostens Learning and McGraw-Hill,
before finally starting his own consulting business.
Paul Dillenberger worked as a math teacher
and consultant in the Minneapolis school system
for 30 years.
Today, he is enjoying retirement.
- To see it expand like that and used by so many people,
it makes your heart feel warm.
Certainly, there was no thought of,
"Hey, let's make something that's gonna change this world."
I guess that's the thing.
A lot of things happen because they happen,
rather than being planned.
(bright thoughtful music)
- [Narrator] Bill Heinemann followed his passion
and worked in Minnesota's bustling computing industry
before retiring.
And in his spare time,
he continues to try to make school fun.
- So I coach math team before and after school.
And I coach chess teams.
You learn so much from playing games.
You know, I learned how to figure out 10%
when I was little when I landed on income tax in "Monopoly."
But you play a game, and you've gotta learn those things.
So, I tried to make learning fun then, in 1971,
and I'm still trying to do that today.
- [Narrator] After completing work on "Number Munchers"
in 1986, Philip Bouchard left MECC
and did some freelance work before joining Broderbund.
After Mattel's disastrous acquisition
of The Learning Company
and the subsequent collapse
of the educational software industry,
Bouchard switched gears
and worked with FedEx and Morgan Stanley on web apps.
- Did that for another 14 years, and then I retired.
Since then, I've been able to do things
that I've always wanted to do,
like write books, like science books,
or really do more traveling,
do nature photography, things like this.
So, I'm still busy, still doing creative things,
but now I don't have to worry about the income,
I just worry about doing the things I want to get out there.
- [Narrator] Today, "The Oregon Trail's" journey goes on.
New versions of the game continue to come out,
and thanks to its prevalence in classrooms
across the country,
it has become a nostalgic memory for millions,
enshrining itself as a permanent fixture in pop culture.
There is "Oregon Trail" merchandise, card games, books,
parody games, a musical, and more.
- Over and over again, you see T-shirts
or other memes on the internet
that say, "You have died of dysentery."
The interesting thing, though,
is that phrase, "You have died of dysentery,"
doesn't actually appear in the product.
Instead, it will say, "Sarah has dysentery."
And then, a little bit later on, you may see another message
that says, "Sarah has died."
Furthermore, it says, "You."
Even if you, as a team leader die,
it gives you by your name.
So if you're the team leader as Philip,
then it says, "Philip has died."
So, never does it say, "You have died of dysentery."
But that meme does capture
the essence of what's happening in the game,
so it's a good meme in that regard.
- [Narrator] In 2016, the Strong National Museum of Play
recognized the importance of "The Oregon Trail,"
and inducted it into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
It was the first game inducted
that was created for educational purposes.
- We were very proud of the fact that we were up there
with "Zelda" and "Pong" and (laughs) "Space Invaders,"
all those games,
and here's the one that was a little different.
- Have so many people that when they find out
that I helped create "The Oregon Trail" computer program,
they, "Oh, that was the highlight
"of my junior high experience.
"If it weren't for 'Oregon Trail,' I would've hated school.
"But there was always that
"to look forward to in history class."
- [Narrator] For more than 50 years,
"The Oregon Trail" has taught students
about the perilous journey people made in the 1800s
for a better life.
It's given educators new ways to teach children
by incorporating games and technology into the classroom.
It helped bring about a whole new software industry,
edutainment games.
But above all, it taught us that learning could be fun.
(bright electronic-folk music)
(bright electronic-folk music continues)