As you might recall from a recent Motherboard article, the history of The Oregon Trail is pretty wild. In 1971, a trio of public school teachers in rural Minnesota created a teleprinter game as a teaching aid. From there, it got transferred into a statewide mainframe and, eventually, sold for profit. Yet the three people who created it weren’t credited for decades, and still haven’t seen a cent of the revenue.
The below video, from YouTuber Hodges Usry, is a quick-and-dirty look at how this happened, assembled from recent talks by the developers as well as archival materials. Usry told Motherboard he took inspiration from our in-depth interview with designers Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger when putting his video together.
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You should watch it, and of course read the article, if you haven’t already! They make a fine pair. The story behind The Oregon Trail is rich enough for a feature film: unfettered creativity butting up against the all-consuming profit motive sounds ripe for The Social Network treatment.
For his part, Usry concurs with something Rawitsch says in the video: that the The Oregon Trail endures because it wasn’t conceived for profit. We don’t disagree, necessarily, but it is nice to be paid.
