The Unluckiest Game of Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail: simultaneously enticing and frustrating schoolchildren since 1971

Sometime during my undergrad years, I discovered that you could download The Oregon Trail for PC and play it at your leisure. No more waiting excitedly for the Thursday computer lab session, where you could maybe shoot a bear and then you’d die of dysentery and then you’d have to let your classmate have a go as you looked on frustrated. This was altogether perfect and wonderful. After all, due to the nature of Thursday computer lab sessions, The Oregon Trail was both desired and unobtainable. Urban legends of people “winning The Oregon Trail” were obvious fabrications, that shit was unwinnable – a simple fact of programming.

One of the first things I discovered upon playing The Oregon Trail in college was that: kids are stupid. Continue reading “The Unluckiest Game of Oregon Trail”