Throwback Thursday: Oregon Trail

Happy Thursday Gamers! Today's retro game is none other than the infamous Oregon Trail!

Players will always remember this frustrating event.

Oregon Trail originated as a teaching tool created by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. Don was a middle school history teacher at the time and used Oregon Trail to teach his students about the difficulties faced by 19th century pioneers. After gaining notoriety for the game, it was expanded and used in numerous schools in the Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service.

In 1974, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium hired Rawitsch to develop the game for classrooms across the state. He added events and consequences related to actual historical probabilities. In 1978, the game was adapted by John Cook for the Apple II, and the rest was history.

Oregon Trail and it's different versions and parodies has sold over 65 million copies as of 2011. It's been included in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die and remains infamous to this day. We remember playing this game in school, and still enjoy it to this day. Welcome to the vault, Oregon Trail!

If you've never seen or heard of Oregon Trail, check out this gameplay video from Shortmandesigner on Youtube.