Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail

[Music] Uh, can you everybody hear me in the back? Ah, there we go. All right. Well, thanks to all of you for coming out at 5:00, the last session of the day, uh, for the classic game postmortem on the Oregon Trail. [Applause] Enough of all this uh highlevel technology stuff that the in the expo area it just boggles the mind. Uh we're going to have some fun. Uh I'm Don Rawitch uh co-inventor of the original version of the Oregon Trail and I'm happy to be here to tell my story. First, a couple of announcements. Uh turn off your cell phones. Um and don't forget at the end of the session uh you're going to get to fill out an evaluation form. You are um instructed to check all the boxes on the the you

know at the highest number level on all the questions. And uh one more um announcement I was going to make. You're you're all familiar with the um the train jam that I've seen uh describe. People get on a train in Chicago and they have 56 hours to make some games. We're considering that maybe next year uh that we have a covered wagon jam and we put put a bunch of people in covered wagons to set them out from Missouri. And the the the cool part about that is they'll have no excuse about quality because they'll have six months to get it right. Uh okay. Uh what I'm going to do here over the next hour or so is to tell you about uh the Oregon Trail game. um where it came from, how it got invented, who invented it, how it got into the schools, how it became so popular, and uh hopefully at the end uh a few suggestions that might be um of of interest to uh today's game developers

uh lessons that we've learned from the Oregon Trail game. And uh there I'm I'm hoping there'll be a little time for questions at the end. Um we are the last session of the day so we have a little flexibility um maybe to extend if there are a lot of questions but we'll see how that goes. So let me just ask how many of you have played the Oregon Trail? Okay. And second question is how many of you first encountered the Oregon Trail game when you were a kid in school? Okay. So, uh, that's that's typically the um the pattern. That's good. Uh, and I I think because there probably were a few people who did not raise their hand, let's just take about two minutes to review what this game is about. Uh, it is a a simulation of an important event in American history. Uh, as you probably know,

uh, let's try to get that. Okay, as you probably know, okay, as we probably know, the computer always puts up question boxes when you don't want one. Uh, the country, what became? The United States was settled on the east coast. Uh, people uh came and they they populated those states. But after a while it became clear for some people this was not where they wanted to be. And explorers had pushed out across uh across this this land and uh determined that there was all kinds of of farming opportunities and and other opportunities for the future and spread the word that uh uh if you want to um really have a new start on life uh go west is is the advice. And um so they

did and uh that people started traveling to the western part of what became the US. Right. Excuse me. Perhaps uh where is my um assistant? There is a box that keeps coming up that says rescue and recovery. And um that applies to me I can see but shouldn't be coming up on the computer. Is it I may have gotten it to go away. Okay, cool. Thanks. Okay, so how did they get to the west? Well, uh the explorers had uh mapped out some trails over the the plains, over the mountains, all the way to the the west coast, the Pacific Ocean. And perhaps the best known of those trails was the Oregon Trail. most heavily traveled during the uh the middle of the

19th century. And um how did you uh travel on the Oregon Trail? You used the vehicle of choice, the covered wagon. You put your belongings in there. You got your family crammed in there. And for the next 2,000 miles, this is how you traveled. Uh it was about a six-month trip. uh and uh this this is what solidified the United States as being the the land as large as it became. Uh and so this western migration is seen as very important in American history. The Oregon Trail game is a simulation of this trip, this journey, uh this hazardous uh adventure that these people went on. And it was popular on uh personal computers uh starting in about 1979 for about a decade and a half was its its um the highest point of popularity. Uh it was

arguably the best known school software of that era and perhaps for many of you this is the era which found you in school and um traveling the Oregon Trail on a computer. However, if we're going to um get to the story of where the game came from, uh we have to go back almost a decade. So, sorry. Uh so, we're going to go back to the 1960s and 70s when computers looked like the thing that you see up on the screen. Uh they were huge. They required their own um rooms to be locked up and kept in. uh but this is how computers started coming into our society and they were used in business and in research. It was inevitable that they would come to be used in education. Uh and so a whole new um area of endeavor and of study uh educational computing uh was born at this time. Now, most of the use of

computers and education could be found at universities at that time, but there were some schools that uh had a local university in town and they they found a way to connect uh to the university's computer and they started offering to elementary and high school kids the opportunity to use a computer. Some of the larger districts had enough money they bought their own computer. Now, this was not the computer that they used to keep track of their finances, to keep track of their student attendance, to keep track of the bus routes. These were computers that were specifically um designated as to be used for instructional purposes. Now, what did people back at that time do with a computer in a school? Typically, um in in K12 education, the activity was to learn to to teach kids something about programming computers. uh and uh the reason uh that that was the main activity is because there wasn't much else you could do at the time. There

were no software applications available to schools that would allow them to do things related to uh math and science and social studies and so forth. Those applications were very scarce. Uh so this brings us to the fateful year of 1971 and three young men who were attending college at the time. Uh they were attending Carlton College, a liberal arts school in Minnesota. Two of them, Bill Heinman and Paul Dillenberger, were math majors and the handsome fellow on the right uh had decided that he was going to be a history major. Uh, as a matter of fact, the first few years we were in college together, we didn't really know each other. But coming into our senior year in the fall of 1971, we were brought together by one thing we had in common. We were all planning to become teachers and uh because of that um we had to do certain things in our our preparation

during our our college years. So, uh, the kind of culminating, um, aspect of your teacher training when you're in college is to do your practice teaching. So, this is where you're assigned to a a school, you're assigned to a supervising teacher in that school, and you get to um observe how schools work, what teachers do, and eventually uh get the opportunity to teach kids yourself, to take over classes, to uh to do that. Uh and this was all to determine whether essentially whether you had the guts to stand up in front of 30 adolescents day in and day out. So, uh, we took advantage of a program that allowed us to do our practice teaching in the city of Minneapolis and, uh, we got an apartment together and the three of us set out to determine, uh, what teaching was all about. The Minneapolis schools was a fairly pro progressive district at that time and

they had set up a computer for the district that all the schools in the Minneapolis district could um connect to and kids could have a chance to use computers. Uh my two colleagues knew something about computer programming from their college studies uh given that they were in math. I knew absolutely nothing about computers at that time. Uh and uh after we had after we had been um in our schools for a few weeks, my supervising teacher notified me that I was going to in about two or three weeks uh ahead, I was going to teach a unit on the western the westward migration and that I needed to prepare myself to do that. So uh I thought to myself, well now how am I going to put this this uh across this historical information in a way that kids are not going to fall asleep at their desks. Uh and I knew that the one thing I needed to avoid was

to assign them to read all about it in their textbook because that's what makes kids uh not like history so much. Um, so I I thought to myself uh that I I had read about educators who had created games for the classroom. Not computer games because there weren't that many schools that had computer access, but um board games, uh paper pencil games, things that that uh would would help you um uh understand a concept better. So I thought, well, maybe I could do the same for the westward migration. Uh, I created a a very large map of the western US area. I drew in the Oregon Trail. Uh, I thought about uh uh the kids maybe were going to draw cards or roll dice. See, I I was I was um ahead of Dungeons and Dragons on this thing. uh and and so uh you know some way was

going to determine uh what happened to them at each stage along traveling along the trail and they'd have little wagon uh markers that they could they could move. That that was my my vision. Uh so I had all the stuff spread out in the apartment uh living room. Uh one day I was just getting into figuring out how this might work and my two colleagues came home. They asked um what I was doing and I explained to them what what it was I had to teach and they thought well that was a game was a pretty uh innovative way to go at this. But the thing is that game would be a lot better on a computer and that was kind of the spark that got us going on this. Um we uh we had at that time 2 weeks to create something that could be uh delivered um on the computer that was available to our schools, especially my school since I was the one teaching history. And um so we set about uh on this task.

Well, what did it mean to put something on a computer in 1971? Well, the first thing is how do how do you communicate with a computer? You use this device, a teletype, which is a kind of a typewriter on steroids. Uh it's a it's a very large and heavy machine, but it's got a keyboard. Doesn't have a screen. Uh you see the roll of paper coming out above the keyboard. So when you type things on the teletype, they showed up on that paper just like kind of like a typewriter. And when the computer communicated back to you, its messages also got printed out on that that roll of paper. Uh it didn't print very quickly and there were there was no screen, no graphics, no audio visual. Um well with one exception. Inside the teletype was essentially a bicycle bell.

And you were told when you bought the teletype that if you put a certain string of code in your computer program that when the computer got there, a message would be sent that rang that bicycle bell, thereby indicating that something significant had just happened in your program. Um, that's that's about all we had back then to um wake the kids up. So, uh that's the teletype. and you know what a computer looks like, but how did you make the connection between the two? And to do that, we need a modem. Now, today, I'm guessing modems are about the size of your fingernail, but back then they were about the size of a shoe box. And uh you see on the right hand side uh what was known as an acoustic coupler. And this is the way that you could um uh connect the teletype through a phone

line to the computer. So, how did this work? Well, uh the you were given the phone number that the computer that was attached to the computer in another building uh that would would pick up your call. And um and by the way, uh that round thing on the phone, that's called a dial for those not familiar. So you dialed up the phone and you listened and it you heard a high-pitched tone and that that was the computer and then you took that handset and you thrust it into the acoustic coupler. So it ended up like you see on the picture. Little light came on and then the teletype started chattering. You had made a connection to the computer. You could now go. Um so that was state-of-the-art. In 1971, uh we started working on the Oregon Trail and uh my friends had told me that we could get something done in two weeks. Um I think later I determined

they'd lied to my face. However, at the end of two weeks, we had a program. We had version 1.0 of the Oregon Trail on a mainframe computer. And as near as we could tell, the bugs were worked out. Uh so it it was time it was time to try it out. Now uh I started thinking about uh how I was going to do this in the classroom because even though the school had a teletype for accessing the computer, it only had one teletype uh which I reserved for a couple of weeks. It was put in my classroom next to the phone with the coupler. And uh and then I thought, but we can't have 30 kids trying to use this thing all at once. So I divided them up into small groups and I created a a rotation of activities. So you could be playing the

game or uh maybe another group would be doing a map exercise, another group would be reading something about the the the trails and traveling west and so on until we got through the rotation and every every group had had a chance to play the game. So uh we we started doing this and how did the students react? They were mesmerized. With only one teletype in the school, I don't think many kids in the school had actually had a chance to use it. So, this was the first thing they'd ever seen, the first computer uh activity that they had ever witnessed. And I think the other thing that probably um caught their imagination was, "Wow, this wasn't math. We thought computers only did math." No, you could do history as well. You could do any subject. So, uh, we we started out and and they, you know, they took to it like ducks out ducks in water. Uh, it it was just like

today, the first time you hand something over to a young child and, you know, an hour later, they know how it works and you don't. Uh, um, they they really, uh, got into it. they seem to be absorbing information from the program about this this western trek and um they couldn't get enough of it. my my friends who taught math made up flimsy excuses why their students should also try the program and uh and so they got that going and they came home and they told me once we'd shown this to some students we now we now experience at lunchtime and after school that a line of kids forms outside our classrooms because they want the chance to come in and get on the teletype and play this name. So we uh we concluded that we we had come up with something significant uh

something that was teaching kids and also um engaging them and that was important. So we we did this for a week or so but it was now December and um uh it's it's almost the holiday time and the end of our practice teaching. Uh, and therefore we printed out the code to the Oregon Trail program on the teletype. So it came out on a like a scroll of paper, the sacred scroll of the Oregon Trail. Then because we were leaving the school district and we didn't think we really had the right to leave our stuff on their computer, so we deleted the program. But we had the sacred scroll. And uh as we as we went back to finish up our college senior year, I guess we all the three of us kind of wondered, would would we ever have a chance to get this

thing going again? Uh before we move on to answer that question, let's take a little bit of a look inside the Oregon Trail version 1.0. So, the Oregon Trail, as you probably know, is is a resource management type game and a game that is played in uh turns uh as is true of many games. So, what would happen is the teletype would print out a date in 1847, I think, and say you're you're ready to start your your trip. You got some instructions. you um you bought some supplies with some money that you had at the start and uh the computer then at the beginning of each turn gave you a status h how many supplies you had left, how much cash, uh how much food, how much clothing, how much ammunition, all the stuff that you need to travel

the Oregon Trail. And then it would offer you the opportunity to make a a strategy decision or two, like, are you going to keep going at this point? Are you going to stop to rest? Are you going to visit a fort where you could um uh where you could use your money to buy extra provisions? Uh are you going to hunt? What are you going to do? And then the fateful question of how well are you going to eat? If you didn't eat very well, you'd probably get sick. If you ate very well, your health would be great, but you'd start running out of food faster. So, you had to kind of balance that decision-making. That was then followed by the computer going into its collection of mostly calamities that could befall you to let you know what had happened. Uh, your oxen broke his leg, your kid got lost, somebody got sick. Uh, well, you're

probably familiar with uh many of these things. Uh, and so you then had to react to a number of them and uh and the computer then moving you on to the next turn would calculate what happened to your resources and how how much you had to start the next turn. and on this went and each turn uh was set up to represent two weeks in the trip. So the entire trip uh would take about 10 to 12 turns um on the teletype. Now this is of course just the general overview but underneath that there was a lot more going on. Uh, and I know that you can't read the small print um from this um age-old diagram. Uh, that's why I've down the right hand side I've kind of annotated in larger print. But um what I'm hoping to show here just visually is that the the the path that

the player takes in each turn, this is one turn we're diagramming here, um actually had many different options, many alternative routes, uh and many different things that could happen to you. So again, at the top, your resources are totaled up. Your you make some strategy choices. You could get attacked by strangers. You could uh many many things in that big box are are problems that could occur. You could get ill. And the computer kept track of your mileage. And when you reached mile post roughly 950, you were at the Rocky Mountains. And so mountain related problems started to happen to you. And as you as you worked your way down this this chart with the computer um using uh probability statements to determine which things happened to you and how often when you

when you went through all of that then it would take you back to the top to start the next turn. So I I'm just trying to make the point here that um well let me start that over again. I must confess to you, we did not create the chart and then program to it. Okay, that that would have been too deliberate. We started programming, you know, uh this is agile, by the way. We started programming and then uh and and it, you know, when we got it to working the way we thought it should, then I went in and and made this chart. So, you know, in the future, we'd remember how how it actually worked. Um, but, uh, as as it turned out, um, it's it, you know, it's a fairly sophisticated simulation model. And, uh, because of all the different routes that the computer can take you through in every turn, virtually no two trips to

Oregon ever, uh, were exactly the same, which means what? players will keep coming back because they can't predict exactly what's going to happen. Now, another thing about the model is that even though we set up some probabilities for how often certain things would happen, we thought that the model would be be more accurate if we pegged those probabilities not just to time passing, but to the terrain of the trail. the the um probability that a certain thing might happen might be different at the beginning of the trail uh or towards the end of the trail. So, how did we build that into the program? Well, let let's take the um example of the fact that uh the pioneers that made this trip uh often were um came into contact with people they they didn't know, strangers.

Now, these strangers might be friends or they may have mayhem on their mind. They may want to rob you of your supplies and that kind of thing. Um, so you you had to deal with this. We figured that it was probably um more likely that you would meet up with strangers, you know, coming upon the trail at the beginning of the trip rather than towards the end because number one, you you weren't so far from civilization at the beginning. So these people could ride out, try to rob you, and then, you know, go back to uh Independence, Missouri. Um, and also because the the geographic terrain at this point is very flat. It's the prairies. Uh, once you get into the mountains, what self-respecting thief is going to want to try to survive there, you know, for for the meager, uh, rewards he's going to get for his um his evil ways. Um so

we thought that um a graph like this was a good depiction of the probability for this this event as um mapped out against the um the terrain of the trail. So along the x-axis we have the mileage from 0 to 2,000 and up the y-axis we have probabilities from 0 to um uh 50%. The math boys then had to figure out how we could represent this mathematically. So a formula here is the formula. So at the beginning of each turn, the computer looked at the mileage you were at and plugged it into m in this equation and that that generates the uh corresponding um y value uh on on the curve. All right. So, if you were at the um like the 400 mile mark, it might be uh a 50%

chance that you were going to meet up with some of these riders. If you were at the uh 1,600 mile uh mile post on the trail, it'd be more like 5%. And so, by using this method, we would generate different probabilities, not just based on what event are we talking about, but also where we were on the trail. Now there's another another aspect that had to be dealt with and that is the use of your firearm because there was no images animation and so forth. So how do we do that? Well, when it was time to use your rifle, which means you had just chosen to hunt or because the computer said uh for example, riders are approaching you. So, you pick up your rifle. The computer would then quickly type out something like type bang or type pow or blam,

something like that. And you, the player, had to type that that phrase in as quickly as you could and press return. So, how did the computer turn that into the results of using your your trusty gun? Well, if you made a typo in your haste, then say for hunting, you got no food. If you spelled the phrase correctly, but you were kind of a slow typist, you got some food. But if you were a good speller and a good typist, good eaten tonight, and your food supply was beefed up, if you pardon the expression, uh for the next uh the next turn that you took. So, um, we didn't have little, you know, shooter guys running around with with guns and so forth, but we might make the we might make the claim that Oregon Trail was the first firsterson shooter game in the history of games.

Okay. So, uh, so this this starts to give you an idea of how how this worked. And again, uh, the kids were fascinated and, uh, and we we were sure that that something could come of this if we could just find a way to do it. Well, the the game sat dormant for a couple of years, um, until 1974 when I um took a job with a newly formed organization in Minnesota called the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation. Uh it was a public agency that had been formed by the state of Minnesota to help schools come to terms with what it would mean to bring computing into the curriculum and how to make that operational in the schools. Uh we we take our hats off to Minnesota on that on this because no other state in the country did something like this which meant that the schools in the other

states had a kind of a chaotic situation. How would they know how to make decisions about hardware to buy and software? How would they train teachers and so forth? But motans from their maybe from their Scandinavian background like to get things organized and so they created MECC mech to uh to help carry that out. Uh I took a job about four months after Mech started up its uh operation. And one of the things that Mech did was it operated one of those big mainframe computers to provide instructional educational computing to all the schools in the state no matter where you were located by setting up a telecom network and and the mainframe computer. Uh, I noticed when I arrived that in that mainframe computer there was a library of applications that people had created, some good, some not so good.

And I remembered that I had one of these sacred scrolls. So I asked, would it be okay if I added something to the library? Oh, sure. They they needed all that they could get. Uh, and so on one um long weekend, I typed in 800 lines of code from my kitchen uh at home uh to put the Oregon Trail game back up on a computer and now it would be not just available to a few schools in Minneapolis, it would be available to the entire state. I realized, however, that the Oregon Trail 1.0 I know having been created in two weeks had not exactly gone through the historical research that uh we would probably want it to to give it uh credence. So I went in and started doing some of this research. Um I checked out the geography, the mileage of the mile posts and made sure that things were

happening along the trail when they should depending on the geography. When we had built probabilities into the game as to how often the various events would happen, we were making educated guesses. But I found in the library that there were books in which were printed the actual text from diaries of people that made this journey in the 1840s and50s. And so I read through some of these diaries and kept score like how many days out of the entire trip was it bad weather? uh how often did somebody get ill and so on and turn those into revised probability numbers um that uh would would make the uh the trip on the computer more in line with what we know from history. Uh and there was one other thing that uh needed to be dealt with and that was the

role of Native Americans. Uh because in in the 1970s and maybe even to today, you'll know if you go to see a western at the movie that we've we've kind of prolonged this stereotype of these uh these pioneers traveling in their wagon trains and the Indians coming down out of the hills and attacking them and uh burning the wagons and so forth. Well, it turns out from the diaries it it didn't it didn't work that way or at least it worked it only worked that way um a lot less than we might think from watching those films. Uh and as a matter of fact, there were diary entries showing that Native Americans helped the pioneers, helped them stay on the trail to know where the trail was going, helped them understand the plants at the side of, you know, the side of the road, so to speak. this one is nutritious, this one will kill you. Uh it was kind of helpful information to have and and

they had it from years of experience. So I made sure that there were events that came up in the game that reflected some of those kinds of things. Uh and um also I created a teacher guide. Do we have any teachers here? I should have asked. We have a few. Okay. Um, well, as any teacher will tell you, if you're giving me a new a new thing to use in the classroom, I've got to have instructions. I've got to have ideas. I can't just do this from scratch. So, I created a booklet that uh Mech published uh that that had information about the game, about the model, about the research, um a bibliography of uh of books and and so forth that you could bring to the classroom. And that was we did that at Mech for all of the applications that we created and that's what gave mech a good reputation with teachers uh for being educationally sound.

So for about five years um the Oregon Trail was the most program on the Minnesota statewide educational system like by a long shot. We used to go into the this the uh airtight room where the computer was to look at the master console to see the number of times each application had been run that day. And so the the best ones had been run two or 30 hund times, but Oregon Trail had been run like 10,000 times. Uh so uh you know it was kind of becoming clear that that this was going to be a popular thing. And after about five years, uh, something interesting happened. As you may recall, uh, I don't know, we were looking through a, uh, Radio Shack catalog one day and we found that this company was selling computers. Computers you could buy for, you know, less than $1,000 and put in your home.

So, personal computers were coming to the marketplace. And uh we realized at Mech that that was going to cause a big change that schools were really going to going to want to buy these kinds of computers and actually own their computing power, not in effect rent it uh from a big system. Um, and so we set up a team who took the best applications from that mainframe system and recoded them to work on the Apple 2 and and then beyond that other brands uh that uh survived the shakeout of the market. Um, and as a matter of fact, uh, that led to in 1985 the release of a new and improved version for the apple of the Oregon Trail, which is displayed in the the little image up there. This may well be the one you remember from from school, the colored

version, the one that played those tiny songs on Apple's two-bit sound card. Uh but uh but the one that um introduced you to uh traveling the Oregon Trail by computer. And as the years went on, new versions were released, new technologies were dealt with. And uh I put down at the bottom uh just referencing that um in the 90s mech was uh purchased like other educational software companies by larger entities, corporate entities um who now found themselves with educational content, but they didn't quite know what to do with it. And in the case of the company that ended up with the Oregon Trail, they had someone create an arcade type version for your uh tablet or phone. Uh but this was not um not designed uh with with the actual historical uh data in mind and so forth.

So uh if you have run into this version, uh it's it's not it's a different kind of game. Uh not the same thing that we used to sell to schools. So, what made Oregon Trail so popular? Well, for one, for many kids in the 80s, uh, this is the first computer they'd ever seen. And this was a very popular thing that many schools owned that could be used on that computer. And so, uh, you know, you you always you always remember your first experiences best. Also, I think because we gave the kids an environment that they could control or some of the time control that that was something they really liked. They didn't like always going to the computer and getting asked to do their arithmetic facts or their spelling lists. Uh they

wanted to be part of something um that that they could influence. And we put them right in the middle of a first-person adventure. Uh, and when I've talked to game people in the present, um, uh, I believe I'm fair to it's fair to say that that often the point will be made if you don't have a good story, you're not going to have the best game you could have. The story is really a key component. And here we gave kids a story to be a part of, which was um, not very common um, back in the in the 80s. Uh and so uh what that means is it it was very popular in the schools in the US and a few other countries. Um but that means that today, several decades later, um Oregon Trail is well remembered by people such as yourselves that used it back then. For example, about a year ago, I got on Reddit and

you may be familiar with their ask me anything feature. So I introduced myself and uh co-inventor the original Oregon Trail asked me anything. Well, in a period of about six hours, uh, while I stayed at the computer, uh, I got over 2,000 comments and, uh, these comments were, uh, they were mostly positive [Applause] except for the losers who couldn't get to Oregon because they didn't figure out the strategy. Uh but most uh the the most memorable thing to me is that there were there were more than a few comments that said I really enjoyed the Oregon Trail. Um of all the things we did in school with the computer, the Oregon Trail is the one I learned the most from and of course that was the purpose from the very beginning. Um, I don't know if you watch uh network

TV, but there's a a great sitcom on you might check out on Wednesday evenings called The Goldbergs. The Goldbergs is a kind of a wacky family in the 1980s. The young son, uh, the young the youngest of the two boys is a computer nerd and they often show him at his Apple 2 and in a couple of segments, the camera swings around to show the screen. And what do you think is there but the Oregon Trail? So, uh, you know, we're kind of a part of the culture. Perhaps you're familiar with a tribute version to the Oregon Trail. And this is not a typo in the image there. This is the Oregon Trail, which you may have heard of. It's similar to the Oregon Trail in that it involves a trip across the country. However, you take this trip in a car and uh the setting is an uh apocalyptic uh uh US that that's been um

you know destroyed a lot and your biggest um hurdle that you have to get by is all of the zombies that are running around the landscape um looking for your brains. Um I met the young men who uh who made this game. Um they're sane. Uh, and to my knowledge, this has been a kind of a popular thing. I mean, they just launched it, you know, with with a little bit of funding, but um, I think a lot of people have played it. And, uh, perhaps uh, uh, most, uh, important to me is that we're in the Hall of Fame. [Applause] The uh Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York is a place that uh catalogs and displays all the stuff that

kids have ever had fun with. It is an amazing place. You must go there. Uh and a couple of years ago, the the Strong decided that uh they wanted to start emphasizing computer games as part of that fits in with play. uh and that um to help emphasize that they created the World Video Game Hall of Fame. So in 2015 they inducted six programs, the of course the iconic Pac-Man, Tetris, World of Warcraft. uh last May. Again, they they do this every year. And using their panel of experts and um nominations from the population at large, they enshrined six more games uh computer games, and one of them was the Oregon Trail. And proud to say it's the only one of the 12 in there so far that was created with an educational purpose in mind. I'm sure more will follow, but um I got to be

there at the little ceremony that they held and u it's is really a special time. Um all right, when we invented the Oregon Trail game, uh we had no guidance. We had no examples. Nobody had written books on how to create effective educational games. Um uh there were no uh university courses in this. There was there were no consultants to consult. Uh and so all we really had was our instincts as uh teachers as future teachers. Uh and fortunately it appears that we got a lot of stuff right that today you would know from all of your background and experience um are the right things to do with a game. So, just to quickly sum that up, uh we gave the player a degree of control. It wasn't all random. We put

the player in the middle of a story that would engage him or her. It was a a very simple game to use, but there was a very sophisticated model underneath. Uh the resources were balanced well with the obstacles. uh if you give kids uh something to do on the computer that's too hard uh they'll give up and if it's too easy they'll get bored. So you have to have just the right balance so that it continues to be a challenge and they come back time and time again. When we talk about an educational game, uh I I like to point out that the game becomes much more um valuable uh and much more successful if you have multiple layers of learning. So just to to give my examples, what do kids learn from the Oregon Trail? Well, one thing they learn it's a game. And so um you learn a strategy by playing the game and

replaying the game. It's a it's a thought process. Uh, interestingly enough, this actually is another reflection of what actually happened historically. When the first settlers took the trail, those that survived when they got to the west wrote back to the uh the family in the east, you know, Pony Express or however they got a letter back there, and they said, uh, if you're going to come and join us out here, here's what you need to do because we know from, you know, being in the first wave, here's the clothing, here's the the cash, here's the thinking about the food and so forth. Um so the more that people made the trip the more information was built up that would help them be successful. The mortality rate started to come down. Um uh so that that is a reflection I think of what happens when you when you play a game and uh uh and

it's it's the kind of thing that that that keeps uh kids interested in it. You learn about topics, you learn something about history, you learn about geography, you learn about resource management. Uh these are things that can be matched to the standards that schools are now uh being held to um in their programs. And then there's another thing that I uh experienced watching kids play this game in uh in the early days when because of the teletype shortage, you had to play as a group that there were things that happened in that group activity uh that that were very interesting. The kids kids figured out uh pretty quickly that there were going to be lots of decisions that they had to make in playing this game. And so, how do 10year-olds, 8-year-olds make decisions when they have a group? They yell at each other. I want it my way. I want it my way. Well, the kids

that that I saw playing this game eventually looked up at the clock in the classroom and realized if they didn't get this to be um a more um organized process, they were going to run out of time, they'd never find out if they got to Oregon. So, what did they do? They invented democracy. They invented taking votes. Okay? Uh, forget the hanging chads. They they took votes. All right? And so, um, they they realized that if they had one person designated to run the voting, they could take a vote, majority rules, that's what we're going to do. We'll get to Oregon, uh, in time. Uh, another thing they invented which to me harks back to um, Henry Ford about a century ago is division of labor. So in the early Ford plant, you know, one person made the wheels and one person made the transmission and one person made the seats and then they, you know, they they put them all together. They were very

efficient at making cars. So the kids realized there were lots of there's lots of stuff to do with the when you're playing the game and everyone was trying to keep track of everything until they decided, okay, first of all, the best typist in our group needs to be the one sitting at the teletype so that they don't do typos and we don't miss out on our hunting. Someone else watched the map, someone else watched the budget, somebody else kept track of the voting. uh th this was this was all done in the minds of these kids. Uh and to me is a a level of learning that in in some in some respects transcends just picking up content and um and uh strategy suggestions. So if you're making games for the education market, the more levels of learning you can put in there, the the more successful the product can be. And finally, I'm a big fan of a collaborative design um efforts. Uh I've

always thought that if we had put 10 computer programmers in a room and said, "Make a game about history," we never would have gotten the Oregon Trail. If we'd put 10 historians in a room and said, "Make a computer game," we never would have gotten the Oregon Trail. But we had uh two math guys, one of one of whom was well into computers, and one history guy. and that that collection of backgrounds brought forth all the questions, all the new ideas, all the suggestions that made um Oregon Trail successful. So, if if you're forming a team to make a game, uh make sure you've got diversity on that team. Speaking of team, here they are 25 years after the invention of the game, which was about 45 years ago. Uh that is myself, Bill Heinman, Paul Dillenberger, Bill holding one of these sacred scrolls that was printed off the teletype. He I I found

out recently that he still has that scroll and that at one point his son asked him, uh, "Dad, because I I realize how valuable this thing is, would it would it be okay if if I took over the sacred scroll?" To which Bill replied, "No. So anyway, um uh a great great pair of colleagues to have um gone through this and the Oregon Trail of course has stuck with us now for over four decades. uh which um uh you know kind of means that for all the learning that people got out of the Oregon Trail about uh history uh I learned some things about life from the Oregon Trail from from the Oregon Trail game and some of these things may apply to your own your own efforts in uh creating games. So let's just say

plan ahead. There's danger out there. Be patient. The journey is long. If you persevere, you'll find your green valley. And even if the water's deep, sometimes you just have to your wagon and head out from shore. Thank you very much everybody. Appreciate it. Thank you. Uh we do have a few a few minutes uh and we can take some questions and I believe there are microphones in the aisles uh that could be used if anyone has a question that they're willing to say publicly. Hi. Uh what was I'm right here. Um what

was the most surprising thing to you um with the kind of explosion of popularity from Organ Trail? Well, um I I I guess I kind of struggle with that because um you know, I had I had nothing to compare it to. I I was happy to see that people liked the game and the fact that schools started um ultimately purchasing the game from Mech in in its um you know Apple versions and so forth. Uh it just seemed like kind of a natural thing. But um I I I will say that uh if something surprising might be that at the time that Mech was um bought by an investment group to take it over, Oregon Trail, I think accounted for about onethird of Mech's annual revenues. So

uh the the mech group over the years uh developed about 250 to 300 products and this one product was uh bringing in a third of the money. Wow. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Uh yes sir. Amazing talk. I just wanted to say thank you for the experience of asking my teacher what dysentery was and the following. If I may clarify, dysentery was not brought up in version 1.0. That was the uh that was the Apple version where the team added it. Yes. Thank you for the fascinating peak into history. What are some educational games from modern times that you think are doing it right and why? I'm sorry. I'm I'm getting a kind of an echo, so I'll yell. Is that better? What are some modern educational games that you think are right and why? Well, uh let's see. First of all, um I

may not be as up to-date as uh as necessary, but um uh one thing that I'm that I'm fascinated with is that perhaps the most popular educational game today is um Okay, I'm drawing a blank. What what's what's the one that looks like you're digging through all the bricks and making Minecraft? Thank you. I'm sorry. Uh I've seen I've seen um uh notices on the internet where you can buy curriculum guides for the use of Minecraft and suggestions for activities in the classroom that you can do with Minecraft. So that that's been kind of surprising. Um but my um my sense is that that if there if there was a golden age of educational software in terms of making making programs that that were deliberately teaching a particular part in the curriculum. Uh I I think that

that that was a little bit in the past and that in uh since then there's been a lot more use of the internet by schools and um and and various tools that help kids be creative and make their own their own videos, their own productions, uh their own um science experiments and so on. Um so a a particular game doesn't come to mind for me, but those are some of the things that are going on. Thank you. kind of as a follow-up question. With modern technology, how would you design ordin today? Okay. U come forward. I'm sorry. I'm I'm getting the modern technology. How would you design today? Oh, okay. Well, the first thing we need is virtual reality. But, you know, uh but I have another answer to that question. It's not really related to the technology, but if we

were going to um create something like Oregon Trail today, I would create the Native American version. What was it like to be on the other side of, you know, the other side of the wall, so to speak? Um uh that that would be that would be kind of fascinating, especially if they could um uh you know, somehow uh communicate with each other. I I will I'll bring up one other thing and and maybe this would be um today's technology would make it easier. Uh Mech experimented at one point with a version of Oregon Trail that was aworked version so that you could have multiple uh travelers and that the decisions they made would affect each other. Um that and that was that was not an easy thing to pull off uh in the with the technology of the 80s. Uh but but maybe uh today it could be done a lot better and that would be kind of interesting to

be in a wagon train with with people you don't know maybe and to see what the what kind of social dynamics would come out of that. You're very welcome. Um, I grew up in Minnesota and I I played uh Oregon Trail, Old Lake, Number Munchers, all these games. And somehow I never knew that they were made in Minnesota. You know, there was any kind of computing stuff going on there. And I'm really interested to hear about what MET was like specifically was the fact that it was stateun publicly owned corporation. that make it easier to experiment with educational software versus maybe a profit orientated company. Uh okay, let's see. There were a number of questions there. But the first thing that I might say is you know why people say well why did this happen in Minnesota? And the thing that that uh perhaps people are not so aware of is that

before Silicon Valley there was a Silicon Valley in Minnesota that during the 60s and 70s companies like IBM, UNIVAC, Honeywell, Control Data um and uh Burroughs uh some some I can't remember either had their national headquarters in the Twin Cities or they had large installations there. Um, and so Minnesota was kind of the computing capital of the country right up until the day that um, you know, Waznjak developed something that didn't require a big room to put it in. Um, so uh, it it it's kind of logical that that that you know it would have grown up there. Um, now let's see what what was another aspect. Oh, what was Mech like? Yeah. Well, Mech's the only place I've ever worked that I would have paid them because um I mean in addition to working

with a with a a crew of incredible educators, you know, former teachers who came to do this. Um uh there there just was a uh was a spirit and a camaraderie there. And what was so exciting about it was we were inventing something that that hadn't been invented before. we were the the first wave of people that worked in the educational computing uh you know business quote unquote. Um so uh it it's a it's an experience that uh that most people who worked at mech uh would say you know they they will never forget. Okay, it's a little after 6. Thank you so much for coming. I'll stick around if you want to talk.