Hitch up your oxen, find some water barrels and get ready for some westward expansion because Oregon Trail is now available to play online — for free.
The Internet Archive, which is best known for running the world wide web’s time capsule, The Wayback Machine, has put the game that traumatized countless children of the ’80s and ’90s online. That means future generations can feel the oppressive horror of attempting to fight their way across the Oregon Trail on a steady diet of squirrel meat with only an axe, some rope and frequent bouts of dysentery, pausing in their manifest destiny only long enough to etch grandma’s epitaph on a makeshift tombstone on the side of the trail. Fun, right?
The Oregon Trail incorporates simulation elements and planning ahead, along with discovery and adventure, as well as mini-game-like activities (hunting and floating down the Dalles River). Travel The game includes several landmarks along the trail where players can make decisions, shop for supplies or rest.
- Travel Oregon has created a new version of the 1990’s computer game, and it’s just as delightfully pixelated as we remember. But this time, you get to travel the Oregon trail with craft beer and kombucha. The Oregon Tourism Commission hasn’t followed the real historic Oregon trail in their version.
- The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail.
- The Oregon Trail is an older, very popular computer game that was developed by Bill Heinemann, Don Rawitsch, and Paul Dillenberger back in 1971. It was then put out on the market in 1974 by MECC. The game is simple and was created to teach school children about the life of a 19th century pioneer on the Oregon Trail.
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Of course, Oregon Trail isn’t the only game available. There’s also Duke Nukem, Street Fighter, Burger Blaster, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Lion King and Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer and more than 2,393 other MS-DOS based game titles ready to play in an immersive and engaging lesson in interactive internet preservation.
The online arcade is a “software crate-digger’s dream: Tens of thousands of playable software titles from multiple computer platforms, allowing instant access to decades of computer history in your browser,” the archive wrote. And they definitely want people to play the games, but be prepared to offer feedback. According to a post announcing the new resource, the site’s software curator Jason Scott wants people to reach out and report bugs as they play. “Some of [the games] will still fall over and die, and many of them might be weird to play in a browser window, and of course you can’t really save things off for later, and that will limit things too. But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly,” Scott wrote.
So start playing, but prepare for dysentery.
[Via The Washington Post]
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