Pioneer life was brutal, which is why Oregon Trail was originally developed in 1971 by three college students on a mainframe computer as a way to teach bored middle schoolers about history.

A closer look

Pioneer life was brutal, which is why Oregon Trail was originally developed in 1971 by three college students on a mainframe computer as a way to teach bored middle schoolers about history. The game became incredibly famous in the eighties and nineties for its hilariously brutal mechanics, where millions of digital pioneer families died horrifically from dysentery, snakebites, and terrible river fording decisions. Generations of American children grew up traumatized by the sheer fragility of nineteenth-century life, spending their computer lab hours watching their virtual oxen drown in shallow water. It is truly the gold standard of educational software, tricking kids into learning geography by forcing them to manage a high-stakes, historically accurate death march across the Midwest!