For the generation of Americans who grew up in the 1980s, this game, designed by Don Rawitsch of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium in 1978, was the ultimate in American odysseys—a road trip story of worst-case scenarios that taught us the pleasures of surviving everything a tough, cold world throws can throw at you. Now, that generation has grown up, and they’re not ready to give up on the Oregon Trail.

Adults today, with real resources and skills and perhaps even a measure of success in the game behind them, are taking the nostalgic computer game, and turning it into a live action, role-playing, full contact game. I’m one of them, and I came to win.

Not all survive the trip. (Photo courtesy of Emily Grosvenor)

Rawitsch was a student teacher in a middle school history class in Minnesota when his supervisor charged him with coming up with his own lesson plans about the great American Western migration. Few classrooms had computers at the time and the personal computer didn’t even exist. Rawitsch envisioned a board game where players would travel across a map of the United States, but after a conversation with his roommates—two mathematics majors—he created a barebones computer program for a teletype device with a dial-up connection. “There was no precedent for computer games, nothing to admire or to look to for inspiration,” Rawitsch told me.

A few years later, after reading several diaries of trail survivors, Rawitsch took the game code to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and began incorporating the narratives and statistical realities of real settlers into the game’s interface. Things in the game happened not at random, but based on the actual historical probability of it happening. “When you lose oxen in the game, it is based on the historical record and the probability of that occurring at that point on the actual trail,” Rawitsch said.

In some ways, Oregon Trail was the antidote to the self-esteem movement that was raging at the time. The game didn’t care how we felt about ourselves. There was no time to gauge your feelings when your wagon just broke apart in the Platte River. When your kid just died from cholera, you didn’t check in with each other, you just kept your wagon train a-moving.

In the decades since, the game has allowed users to experience one of America’s great mass migrations—over 200,000 made the grueling trek to the land they called "Oregon Country" in the mid-1800s—through a sometimes unintentionally funny simulation. Beginning with pixelated green-on-black graphics and moving later to today’s realistic, color versions of pioneer life for the iPhone, the game has taught two generations of Americans the rewards of planning ahead, perseverance, survival, and patience while planting in their minds a compelling story of leaving it all behind in search of greener pastures. “It was the first computer game most people remember where they were dropped into the story of the game and became part of the experience,” Rawistch said.