Hat tip to Found History for this modern remake of the Oregon Trail computer game — The Thule Trail. It mimics the visual style and structure of the original Apple II game, while traveling West in 2007, by car. Here’s the game’s description:
Load up your car for the classic American getaway: the road [...]
From I Can Has Cheezburger, hat tip to Trevor Owens. For readers who are confused, you may want to read up on image macros and a brief history of how they’ve evolved.
The Oregon Trail computer game’s gender bias is narratively implicit, but visually explicit. Users control a character that is never textually referred to as a specific gender, however its visual representation is indisputably that of a male figure. In the game, the wagon leader makes the decisions along the journey and is presented as male, [...]
An enthusiast recently created The Oregon Trail Shrine, archiving images and downloadable copies of both the Oregon Trail and Oregon Trail Deluxe computer games. Similar to the oral histories I collected with my Oregon Trail Survey, the site shares game reviews and stories submitted by fans. This review struck me:
After playing this game [...]
In her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Karen Halttunen delivered a speech that would be published in American Quarterly the following year, entitled “Groundwork: American Studies in Place.” She discussed the “disneyfication” of American place-making; the replacement of reality with an idealized vision that engenders racism and sexism. What occurs [...]
Rob MacDougall recently posted a pre-history of roleplaying games that thoroughly describes its origins in far greater detail than my previous post on early war gaming and Wild West roleplaying. Studying Wild West roleplaying simulations in Second Life I’ve continuously asked myself where this pattern of behavior came from, and why people represent themselves in [...]
Many games were inspired by the success of the Oregon Trail computer game, including a series of simulations in the 80’s written in BASIC that have uncanny similarities (more on that in an upcoming entry). Here are two examples of contemporary web-based games that were undoubtedly inspired by OT.
Westward Trail
The Oregon Trail Online
Two honors American History II students uploaded a short documentary focusing on The Oregon Trail. There’s a blurring of the history the Oregon Trail, and the Oregon Trail II game with much of the visual content borrowed directly from the game. At times it’s very formal, but at other moments (when one of [...]
Many of the ideas I’ll share regarding The Oregon Trail computer game have developed over the past 18 months and after a series of conversations with Don Rawitsch, the game’s creator and Wayne Studer, the project manager overseeing the development of Oregon Trail II. I will continue to build upon these ideas within my [...]
In 2004 – two years before Sigil or any other Western role playing simulations appeared in Second Life there was a game being developed and aptly called “Wild West Sim.” To my knowledge this was a failed attempt, but it sounds incredibly ambitious including the ability to support tens-of-thousands of players. Online there [...]