The Tragic Backstory Of The Oregon Trail

if you grew up in america in the last 50 years you've probably seen this or this or maybe even this the oregon trail one of the best selling educational games of all time it was created by three students and earned billions in revenue but they never even got a penny from its success let's find out why our story begins back in the fall of 1971. don rawich was attending carlton college in minnesota dawn was a history major and wanted to be a teacher so in his senior year he had to participate in a special program in order to determine if he could do it and eventually if he could the university would have him teach a class of his own at one of the schools in the district as a trial run wanting to teach is one thing but being able to wrangle a class of 30 kids takes some serious commitment we were all kids once we know how horrible they can be in this program is where don met bill heinemann and paul dillenberger two math majors who also wanted to be teachers as a part of this program the three of them were all placed together in the same apartment and they quickly became friends by this time dawn had advanced far enough to where he was about to start teaching his own classes now dawn had a supervisor teacher who informed him hey by the way you're going to be teaching the class the unit on america's westward expansion and you have three weeks to prepare the whole thing now dawn could have easily said great done some light reading for a few weeks and then just tell the kids to sit quietly and read their textbooks all class but anyone who has had a teacher like that knows it's not fun to put it nicely but with three weeks left to prepare could you really blame dawn for taking the easy route well if he did this video probably wouldn't exist instead dawn thought up the idea of making a game for the kids to play that could teach them well keeping them engaged not a video game but a board game he created a massive map of the western united states drew in the oregon trail and created cards that would determine what would happen to players as they made their way west along the trail dawn laid it all out in his apartment's living room and got to work pretty soon after his roommates bill and paul came home after seeing it one of them said it's cool but it would be better on a computer which is what bitcoin's creator must have said when he saw money for the first time now at the time computers were just starting to become popular for educational purposes you couldn't do much with them as there were very few programs that existed at the time but you could use them to learn how to code your own programs now the only people that could afford computers were well-funded universities and school districts as they were still these massive room-sized pieces of equipment the city of minneapolis's school district had them and wanted to put these things to good use so math majors at carleton college could use them to learn how to code or write their own programs which is what bill and paul did but let's say they could turn dawn's board game into a computer game what use is it if the students at nearby elementary schools couldn't use it do you really want to shuttle 30 kids on a bus over to a big delicate piece of machinery that costs probably more than everything in their parents bank accounts combined no well the school district allowed the nearby schools to make use of the computer remotely schools that had a dial-up connection could use a machine called a teletype to access the district's mainframe computer from anywhere the teletype was like a typewriter on steroids it had no screen and a keyboard you could send messages to the computer by typing words out onto the paper from there the computer would respond by printing its own words onto the paper now at this point dawn was already a week into his three-week preparation time and just so happened to know absolutely nothing about computers but rather than continue working on the board game he put all his faith in his roommates and told them to create the computer version of the game and that's exactly what they did in just two weeks they had created version 1. 0 of the oregon trail and it was impressively complex this chart on screen displays the entire flow chart of how the game was played you had to manage resources decide what paths to take fend off bandits diseases and all sorts of problems and hopefully just maybe you survive the expedition and make it to the end of the trail the program not only worked but it was a hit at the school dawn taught at the students loved playing the game and were actually retaining the information it taught them lines would form after school of kids who all wanted to try this game but once don's teaching trial was over for the year that was it he needed to get back to his own life at carleton college so dawn printed out the program's code on a long scroll of paper and deleted the game from the computer entirely the game sat on this paper in don's desk drawer and he wondered if he would ever need it again don graduated college soon after and in 1974 he took a job at a newly formed government agency called mec it stood for minnesota educational computing consortium they essentially existed to assist minnesotan schools in bringing technology into their classrooms when mech formed they also purchased their own mainframe computer which they would share with the entire district don when he arrived looked through the computer's list of programs all of which were accessible by the schools in the state some were good others were well piles of not so good don remembering that he still had a copy of the oregon trail game on that piece of paper asked his superiors if he could add his program to the computer they said sure why not and soon after he spent all weekend manually rewriting this code don realized that since the game was made in only two weeks previously it wasn't the most historically accurate so he put in the extra time to research more about the real life oregon trail and made some upgrades when he published the game to the computer it was again an immediate success it was the most run program throughout the entire state by a massive margin some programs were ran hundreds of times a day whereas the oregon trail was in the thousands this went on for about five years but in the background a big unavoidable storm was brewing the launch of personal computers for about a thousand bucks you could now get a powerful computer in your own home that didn't take up the size of a whole room mech realized that they were going to have to change the way they do things because schools were without a doubt going to want to get their hands on these so mech formed a team that recoded their most successful applications to work with the apple ii home computer oddly enough dawn wasn't involved in the new version of the oregon trail and the new team were actually the ones who came up with the now iconic phrase you have died of dysentery in a later interview don actually said he hates that quote so it sort of ruins the meme for some people so i'm sorry if it did for you now the version they created was fairly simple by today's terms but definitely an improvement from its predecessor once the game was ready mech began selling apple twos to schools in the district at a discount through a contract and along with it came free copies of their software like oregon trail all placed on floppy disks now this whole thing was pretty unheard of at the time minnesota school district was far beyond others everywhere else in the u.

s so when other states caught on they wanted to copy them following in minnesota's footsteps they started purchasing apple 2s for their school districts but they didn't have the software that minnesota did at this point the minnesotan government wanted mek to be more self-supporting as it was the perfect time to do so so mek decided to start selling their software to the other 49 states now this might come as a shocker but the oregon trail took off again but there was a slight problem piracy so the game's later versions had a feature where you could see the tombstones of past players players could put in their name and a brief memento about their life it would then save that to the computer and future players could come across it many players encountered a tombstone from someone named andy who simply wrote pepperoni and cheese but it was horribly misspelled it was believed to be a reference made by the game developers to this tombstone pizza commercial what do you want on your tombstone pepperoni and cheese time for tombstone pizza but it wasn't made by the developers at all so how did so many people run into it well because every tombstone is saved to the computer if you theoretically moved that copy of the game to another computer all the old tombstones would come with it so andy whoever he was likely broke through the oregon trail's piracy prevention played a round of the game and wrote that tombstone they then burned that copy to some floppy disks and either sold it somewhere or gave it away from there this copy spread all over the nation and along with it andy's weird tombstone this version was legitimately everywhere even in schools so if you encountered this message while playing you're playing on a pirated copy so your school might have some explaining to do but even widespread piracy didn't put much of a dent in mex profits especially once they started allowing schools to make as many copies of the game as they wanted after purchasing it once a decade and a few oregon trail versions later mek was bought out by another company for 5. 25 million dollars this may sound like a lot but the state of minnesota made a terrible deal at the time the oregon trail accounted for roughly one-third of the organization's profits when mech's new owner listed themselves on a stock exchange soon after the public learned that they were making about 30 million in yearly revenue with the oregon trail accounting for 10 million of it but if you think that's crazy five years later mech was sold again for 370 million dollars to a company called softkey again with the oregon trail being the main selling point but it gets even crazier in 1999 mattel bought softkey now known as the learning company for a mind-blowing 3. 8 billion dollars the oregon trail was so big it was impossible to avoid it seems like nearly every kid in america had played it or at the very least had heard of it it was in every computer store and even stores like target started carrying it so you might be wondering how much did its creators earn from all this well nothing when dawn originally rewrote the oregon trails code and published it on mech's mainframe computer he hadn't made any deal like okay so this is my game i want to earn money from it in fact he hadn't even consulted its other two creators bill or paul so when the game was uploaded to that computer any chance of earning a penny from it was over the game was now the property of minnesota in fact none of the creators were even given recognition for being the game's creators until 1991.