Oregon Trail: Saddle up

0:00It's 1847, or maybe 1848, depending on who you ask. You are an independent spasery, and your only job is to get you and everyone you love all the way to Oregon City. That was the beginning of one of the great video games of all time, one of the great educational tools of all time, Oregon Trail. From the Virgin Box Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today on the show, it's time to travel the Oregon Trail. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to ConsumerAdvocate.org. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills

1:02at any vet in the US and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com slash save, right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for the show comes from square. If your business relies on a bunch of disconnected tools to get things done, then it's time to check out square. You can simplify your operations and bring payments, inventory, staff, scheduling, and online orders into one intuitive system. If you're starting a business or running one that deserves better tools, square helps you sell, manage, and grow without slowing down. Right now, you can get up to $200 off square hardware at square.com slash go slash version history. Run your business smarter with square. Get started today. All right, we're back.

2:02It's time to talk Oregon Trail. Joining me in the studio, Chris Grant. Hello, sir. Hello. The nerdiest gamer I know, the person with the most gaming consoles that I know. It depends on who you know, but that's probably true at the moment. Also possessor of a cold, a raspy voice. What are we doing here? I think it's Lauren Gytis. Okay. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. Chris, I can't tell you it's been like this for a minute. All right, we're going to keep a steady stream of T coming into the studio. We'll get through it. Appreciate you being here. Thank you. Also here, Philip Pouchard. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. You are not only a person we brought in here to talk about this game, but you are a part of the story of Oregon Trail. We're going to get into it a lot, but just very quickly up top, give us a sense of your role in the story of Oregon Trail. All right. Well, the first generation of the product was already well-known, primarily a text game. And in 1984, I was assigned by a mech lead a team to create a completely reimagined version.

3:02The first completely reimagined version of this game. We spent 10 months on it. It came out at the end of July and 85. And it worked. It was always succeeded. It sure did. All right. This is good. Let's get into it. Let's start at the beginning here. I want to rewind back to the early 1970s with three people in Minnesota, Don Rauich, Paul Dillenberger, and Bill Heinemann. There are three student teachers working on stuff and they have this very cool technology story. This is the kind of sort of eureka moment you hear about in tech all the time. And unlike most of them, this one appears to be real, which makes me very happy. So they're in Minnesota. They're teaching, and Don's supervisor asks him to come up with some lesson plans for a story about the American migration. And Don decides, so I'll rather than read them out of a textbook, I'm going to make a board game. And the way I understand it, he basically rolls out this giant thing of butcher paper on the floor of their house

4:04and starts designing a game. And he puts together a board game and figures out how all the pieces are going to move. He has just this sense that there's a better way to teach kids how to do this than reading them a book about the Oregon Trail. His roommate, Bill Heinemann, decides, okay, actually, this is a computer game. This is very, very early. I mean, this is like the 70's, Chris. Computer games are like not really a thing at this point. No, certainly not at home. Yeah. Certainly not in any way that you would experience in a school setting or a home setting. Yeah, Phillip, actually, for folks who didn't live in this era of computing, can you describe what it was like to interact with a mainframe computer? Like if you're trying to use a computer in 1971, what are you doing? Well, one of the most common ways of interacting with punch cards, so the computation center would be the huge basement of the building, the whole staff maintaining it. You bring your punch cards in, see bits in the end later on, these punch cards come back.

5:05However, in the case of Mac, most of the interaction was done with a teletype terminal. So you have this big thing, that looks like a typewriter on a stand and a big role of yellow paper in every interaction, whether you were typing or the computer was typing back to you would appear on this continuous role of yellow paper. And then if you wanted to save the program for later, if you couldn't save it on the computer, then you would save it to punch tape. Neither of those things that lend themselves to fun, fast, twitch video games. So, okay, so they decide that, okay, we're gonna make this into a video game. I think they had 10 days to do it before he had to go teach this in class. And Bill Heinemann is like, okay, I can make this for you. And Philip, I have another question for you on this front because there's this great shout out to the gaming historian YouTube channel, which has a terrific video on a lot of the backstory of this game. And there's a bunch of moments in it where Bill Heinemann in particular talks about

6:06the idea of Oregon Trail immediately making sense to him as a computer thing. That it is like fundamentally, it's about weights and measures and probabilities and algorithms. And Philip, you're part of the game doesn't come along for a little bit still. But can you explain what it is about even the original bassist idea of Oregon, as this game came to be called, that makes it make sense as a computer game? Yeah, so Bill saw that it was fundamentally a resource management game. So, you have certain boxes in which you have quantities of certain amount of food right now. You have a certain number of bullets. You have a certain number of oxen. And you want to maintain adequate amount of each of those resources for your entire trip in order to survive. And from a mathematical standpoint, that is the core of the game. And that things that happen along the way, influence causes increases or decreases in these boxes. But the box is can actually influence one another as well. So that was the concept that he gathered,

7:08me, understood and implemented in its first rudimentary forum. It's kind of a perfect spreadsheet problem in a certain way, right? Like it's Oregon Trail is to some extent like a very fancy spreadsheet. And this is the Eureka moment you said. Like he saw the game on the floor and had it explained to him and said, oh, this is a math problem. Like I can solve this with a computer. Also, I thought it was funny earlier, and you said video game. And I think that when we talk about a game like this, like you'd be thinking of a video game. And the mechanics of it feel like a video game, but those early versions were very much not video. Like quite literally not a bit. Not a bit. Yeah. So yeah, I mean computer game or PC game, but it's this fascinating proto video game landscape. Yeah, that's actually a good segue into the thing that they build is fundamentally it's a text adventure. It gives you a bunch of information and then asks you to answer a question essentially and you answer the question and whatever way you want. And then the computer goes off and calculates its thing and then it comes back. They build this game in 10 days.

8:08It's ready for the kids to play. They call it Oregon and they load it on to the main frame of the school system immediately everybody falls in love with it. Like it's one of the things that I think is so interesting and so sort of unusual about Oregon Trail is there is something about it that is both extremely complicated and also kind of immediately understandable that you just show up sit down and start playing and it grabs you like right away. Do you remember when in time the game starts Chris? Here's your first trivia question. Oregon Trail. What year does it start? And where are you in America? You're in Independence, Missouri. Good work. 1815. 15. Philip, when was it? The original version said it in 1847 and I moved one year later to 1848. There you go. Okay, I'm actually very glad you just said that because I spent a lot of time reading sources that said it was 1848 and reading sources that said it was 1847 and I was like,

9:09well, somebody has to be wrong here. But you just changed it. That is very good to know. In my research, the students that they showed it to, one of the students in Minnesota at the time was believed to be Prince. Yeah. Which is my favorite. Yeah, a little, yeah, no, get this early proponent of Oregon Trail. Yep. But so the game itself structurally got a lot of things right at the very beginning. Philip, I want to hear your take on kind of what that early game was. But it was basically, there's so much of it that becomes familiar through the rest of the series, right? You start by saying, by picking resources, you have to spend money on the stuff that you're going to take with you. You have different probabilities for how it's going to go, depending on what you get. If you spend more money on a wagon, your wagon will go faster. So you'll get there for longer, but you have less money to spend on food. So you'll probably die. Like, it becomes this resource management game right out of the box. And the way that it worked is it was, I believe Philip correct me if I'm wrong. It was every two weeks was sort of the mark of the game, right?

10:12That's correct. So every two weeks, it would run through the math formulas again to compute your current quantity of resources in each of those approximately five boxes. Yeah. And then it was basically like, it also then tried to figure out sort of where you were geographically. There's this not designed to be a silly game about going on the Oregon Trail. This is not actually tell you what might happen if you were on the Oregon Trail. So like if you were, you would go a certain distance and then you were in the mountains. And then certain things become more likely once you're in the mountains. And they're building all of this into a pretty unsophisticated computer. But in, as far as I can tell, a fairly clever, intelligent way of actually getting the game to present the journey in a relatively real scenario. Which is just very cool. And I think it's also, as far as I can tell, one of the things people immediately glom onto is like there. You get the sense of being part of this thing. As a kid who grew up playing a lot of text adventure games, I was born in 1979. So, you know, I was solid eight years after they made this.

11:14But growing up in the 80s and playing Zork, those games do an incredible job of putting you somewhere. Yeah. Like really giving you the fantasy just like a novel would. And it's an art form that is still upheld today. But I think that the idea that a classroom and the early 70s, seeing this for the first time, I think they would immediately be transported. The funniest part about this very early version of the game is they give it to the kids. The kids play it. The faculty loves it. Everybody was playing it before and after school. And after like a few days, they take it off the computer, print out the source code and all move on with their lives. They're just like, this was great. Everybody learned about the West River expansion and were finished. And they all just sort of disappear back into whatever else they were doing. Until like you mentioned, Philip, mech the Minnesota educational computing consortium, an organization that is actually sneakily important in the history of technology that I knew absolutely nothing about until very recently. Brings Don back on

12:17and says, Hey, let's bring this game back. Philip, can you explain what mech was and kind of what it was designed to do in those days? Yes, mech was designed to bring computational power to the schools all across Minnesota, across all, you know, K through college. And so it was founded in 73 and Don joined soon thereafter and and brought along the Oregon Trail. Yeah. And I found an interview with Don where he said that a mech game had four principles, which I really liked. So I'm going to read them to you. He said, first, the information based on relevance had to be historically accurate. Second, learning couldn't be spread out in patches. It had to be woven throughout the game start to finish. Third, it had to include thorough documentation for the teachers to use it as a teaching aid and forth the games had to be fun. It's kind of a perfect way to describe what a game like that ought to do. And I especially love, and I think there's a lot of Oregon Trail like to be learned from that second principle. Learning couldn't be spread out in patches. It had to be woven throughout the game start to finish. Like I would bet most people

13:18who grew up with Oregon Trail did not experience it as an educational game. Yeah, I think the thing it does so well is that the gameplay itself reinforces. So you die a lot. And like I think the thing that people remember the most about this game is that it's brutal. And so even if you forget Independence, Missouri, you'd remember that you die. Yeah. And that the over and over and over. And over I guess a safe one. Right. And I think as far as education goes, like that lesson itself is, you know, I think to his original thesis, probably better learned through this mechanic than through a textbook. Yeah. So so Don comes back and recreates the game by literally retyping the source code off of the thing he printed off of the computer when they shut it down the first time. Makes some updates to try and make it even more realistic. Does some research? Does some good updates to the algorithms and math systems for how all of this is supposed to work? They patch the game in some funny ways.

14:18I guess in the early versions, you could type a negative in the money sign to give yourself more money. They updated the hunting. Philip, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the way the hunting part of Oregon Trail works going forward is actually like the most important part of Oregon Trail. Quite true. It is what many people think about first and what in some ways with the biggest hook through the game. In the original one, you could shoot not just at things you were trying to kill it to eat, but you're constantly having to shoot up things to defend yourself because you're constantly being attacked by bandits and hostile writers and wild animals. And I've moved all of that for the next version where all the shooting was restricted to hunting for food. Interesting. Probably the right decision. But it was even back in those early versions, the text versions of the game which is very matter of factly tell you you died. It's truly kind of a brutal game in that sense.

15:20I never knew this mechanic until I did this research but the original shooting mechanic was you type bang B&G enter. And if you did it as too slow or wrong, you would miss. And one of the amendments they made to it was to add more words, right? So instead of just bang, it was a wham. Pow, pow, good one. And because kids got really good at typing B&G. Sure. Yes. And it gives me like this typing of the dead kind of vibe, you know, just like you win by typing well, which is really fun. That's really good. So Don builds this game or I'd rather rebuilds and updates this game. They make some of these changes and they ship a game called Oregon. Again, it's Oregon all caps because everything on computers was all caps to everyone in the Minnesota educational network. This is 1975 and it just completely takes off. They wrote a guide for how to play it and how to teach with it and the things to read alongside it. And it became to be honest, I had struggled to figure out how big a classroom success

16:21it became. Like I actually don't have a sense of whether it became sort of a core part of the curriculum in Minnesota. Philip, I don't know if you know this any better than I do. I know the game was a hit and people loved it. But like did teachers and school administrators love it at that time? Well, that's an interesting question. It seemed to be that people had positive things to say about it. As to how much it was incorporated into the curriculum, I don't really have a good answer. But part of the issue was that in actual practice, you would cycle the kids through the teletype. You'd maybe put two at a time, maybe three. And so the rest of the class is doing something else. In fact, the teletype probably isn't even in that room. So what if the kids have all been exposed to it? Then you have the opportunity to draw upon that experience and build upon it. And I think that is for me, the real essence of work and trail in the classroom is how do you build upon it after the kids have had that experience? Yeah, I like that. Although right after this comes a very important change which is computers actually start to make their way

17:24at least a little closer into classrooms. It wasn't like it is now where every kid at a desk has a laptop. But right about this time or sort of in the late 70s, this is the kind of first personal computer revolution is beginning. And this is another place where Mac becomes really important. Mac was a big dealer for a little tiny company in the late 1970s called Apple. And Steve Jobs at one point gave a quote that was like the thing that made Apple too was schools buying Apple Sews. And Mac was a big part of that. It started putting computers in schools and in classrooms all around the state and working with other similar organizations around the country and schools were a huge growth machine for personal computers. So this is all happening. And around the same time, the magazine Creative Computing reaches out to the Oregon team and says, Hey, would you just be interested in letting us print your source code in our magazine?

18:26Which is just an insane thing to think of now. It's just a bunch of source code in a magazine. They said yes, and they in fact did so. Can I show you what it looked like? It's a true delight. This is the Creative Computing magazine from May, June of 1978. Well, that was certainly a very important point in the history of this game. Yeah. So I'll just describe this basically. So it's a magazine page. It looks like it's the beginning of a sort of feature article spread. It's got a big headline and beautiful font. It's got someone writing on a horse. There's a picture of a snake for some reason. And then it has a kind of an intro to how the game works. And then just 10 pages of computer code. At the risk of dating myself. You bought this magazine. I'm not that exact one. I spent a lot of time like a really weird amount of time typing code from magazines and computer at home and basic. And when I started taking computer science courses

19:28at a local community college, it was almost doing the exact same thing. I'm just like learning how it worked. And there was a whole period where this is how you would get games on your computer. You would manually type them in. And God forbid you miss or don't close a parentheses or something. But yeah, the idea was exactly what you just said that you would have the thing open next to you and you would faithfully recreate it on your computer and you would be able to run this game. And if you did it that way, you could run all of Oregon Trail. Philip, you were saying this is an important moment for this game. Tell me why. Well, after that time, the only way to experience the Oregon Trail game was to get on Max Timeshire system. And if you didn't live in Minnesota, that wasn't going to happen. So now that the code source code was put out there, it could be adapted for all these personal computers. Normally, he had to make small adaptations for it to work on these other computers, particularly whether they were unique things about each one. And all of a sudden it became well known all over North America. Yeah, it's amazing to me,

20:30frankly, that it spread that way. That just, I guess that's, of course, that's why you put it in your magazine so that people will do that. Otherwise, it's a very boring thing to put it in a magazine. But it is, it says something about that moment in computing that people were willing to do this and would go and apparently a lot of people did. This was also when the game shifts from being called Oregon to being called Oregon Trail. As far as I can tell, the kids in school who were playing the game mostly called it Oregon Trail and it eventually just shifted to being officially known as Oregon Trail. It starts to spread. When we get to the early 80s, Mech starts to more deliberately give it to schools. You can pay a fee and make unlimited copies of the game and install it on your computers. So the thing starts to spread. And right around this time, I believe if I have my timeline right, Mech spins off from being part of the state of Minnesota's government to being its own state-owned still, but it's a corporation. And now the idea is it can grow,

21:30it can do new kinds of things, it can make money. And I believe at this moment, one Philip Bouchard becomes very important to the Oregon Trail story, which we're gonna get to right after this break. We'll be right back. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds. A pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over a thousand dollars. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. According to ConsumerAdvocate.org, you get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the US and Canada with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for the show comes from Square, the system that fixes one of the biggest headaches and running a business.

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23:32Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. All right, we're back. So it's now we're getting to the mid 1980s. Oregon Trail is a sort of burgeoning text adventure phenomenon. And then Philip, you get a pretty, I would assume even at the time, daunting task. Tell me about how you got started making Oregon Trail. All right. So we're looking at the year 1984, but first of all, we fill in what happened from 1980 to 1984, because in 1980, when MEC started distributing an early Apple 2 version, that was based on this code that came out of the magazine we just discussed. Everything that MEC was distributing that time was created by amateurs in their spare time. There were those other things that were professional creating these kinds of games. But by 1984, the entire competitive landscape had changed. Now we had professional designers, professional artists,

24:33professional programmers, and the products looked so different in 84 than they did in 80. So it was really quite mandatory that we produced something, even though it's still going to be for an Apple 2, something that was much more up-to-date, modern, in so many ways. But there was a second issue, which was that MEC, which had become extremely successful in the school market, now wanted to be successful in the home market too. And they thought the home market was the best way in. So prior to my joining MEC, I had already had experience in creating simulation models, resource management, these sorts of things. So and kind of made sense to put me in charge of this particular product. Also, I had this several years of experience at MEC, leading teams working with both programmers and designers. But still, I was pretty amazed by my mandate, which was follow my gut, do whatever I need to do, just makes sure I don't lose the magic of the original. And stick to the Apple 2, even though there are more modern machines out there,

25:34let's do again for the Apple 2. So I was then leading a team of five key people, all of whom played essential roles in the creation of this product, now all of them who contributed ideas, they made it into the design. But I was the lead designer and I wrote virtually all the documents. What you just described, you made it sound like a small task, but that seems like a, frankly, almost impossible task. You have to change the game completely without changing any of what makes the game special and on the exact same hardware on which the game already runs. I think another product of context, and this is this timeline, you heard about 1971 to 1985, the day before when they start. In which the game essentially hadn't changed at all, right? Like the thing you played in 1984 was more or less identical to the game you played in 1971. And that technology curve of like people playing games that were not video games, to the competitive landscape to Phillips Point in 1985, the NES comes out, right? Right. We've already gone through the entire Atari lifecycle and crash

26:36by then, right? Video games are here. They're in people's homes, arcades are popular and computer games and computer gaming. There's a lot of other computers also at home. And so the landscape that they're reinventing this game into is so much different than the proto video game landscape of the original. Yeah, it's really interesting. And so, Philip, you set out to start this and I want you to describe the system of cycles that you created. Certainly. So the original product pointed in a good direction. And I wanted, I needed to go so much farther down that same road. So a couple of the issues I faced was that designing for the home market, I needed to create something that would. Could be played for 40 hours. But the other thing was for me, I really, really wanted to incorporate geography. And in the original game, the only geography was that it was divided into a flat area and a mountainous area.

27:36And that was the extent of any geography in it. In order to do that, I realized I could not use a two week cycle because every because the rate of travel depends upon a number of conditions. And you don't know where you're going to be after two weeks. So I couldn't tie the game to geography if I stuck with the two cycles. So I went with a cycle that was based on landmark to landmark. I did a lot of research and figured out what are the principle landmarks that the real travelers on the trail would anticipate. Then connected these and off created some alternative routes. And then with this cycle though, I didn't want the player to just jump from one landmark to the next. I wanted to feel like they were genuinely traveling on the trail and face issues between landmarks. So that meant I needed another cycle that ran daily. So every day you get an update on the weather, all the, and I, in this particular model, I have instead of just like five boxes of resources.

28:37And I've got like 15 or so or more. I've got lots of different things being tracked. And everything gets updated on a daily basis gets displayed on the screen. The travel doesn't stop, unless the player says stop hearing. It just continues automatically or something really serious happens. And you get to the next landmark. So then day to day cycle within the landmark landmark cycle within the region to region model, which changes the underlying data as you go from region to region. Oh, and of course, the weather that's tied to regions, but often to the month. Right. Because this you could also pick the month that you left, which I remember being like a strangely stressful decision. Because the game would kind of tell you it's like if you leave too early, you know, it'll, it'll be too hot and you'll all die. But if you leave too late, it'll be too cold and you'll all die. And the whole game is stressful. The whole game is wildly stressful. Like asking them to make these choices that are going to result in people dying. And one of my favorite parts is the result in people who have names dying because you got to name them right now.

29:39And when I don't know about you, when I play a game, I think of people close to me. I was playing Oregon Trail in preparation for this podcast. And I picked my name, my partner's name, my kids. Oh, yeah. And then they start dying. And it's like so brutal. But yeah, I think that the asking them to make choices that have these consequences is a fascinating part of the game. I'm curious for both of your perspectives on this moment in terms of the game's complication. Because again, on the one hand, this game is explicitly designed for kids to play. It's supposed to be educational. It's supposed to teach you things. It's not supposed to be a punishingly difficult puzzle game. Right? And obviously, you know, Philip, you're working. There's a very limited resources in terms of like what the computer can actually do. But also, you've got to be thinking, I want to make this game more realistic and more sophisticated. But I don't want it to be so complex that it's impossible to figure out and it kind of kills this propulsive fun

30:41that the game has even as you're, you know, dying in ever more complicated ways. Was that a thing on your mind of not wanting to make it too much in this turn? Well, from the beginning, I had all a huge number of thoughts as to how do I make this game replayable so that you come back over and over again. Now, keep in mind that there were a lot of games out there where your character dies. You know, they think of Pac-Man. You always die and the goal is to get farther each time. Right. So I wanted players to have to play it three or four times before they succeeded in getting to Oregon. So it was intentionally somewhat difficult, but not so difficult that you can't learn what you need to learn to succeed. So each kid that dies then part way along the way comes up with a hypothesis. Well, I wonder why I died. What can I do different next time? And so there's often this effort to keep going. Try again, try something else. Try something I haven't tried before. Maybe I need, maybe it should talk to people.

31:43And then of course, once you get to Oregon and you get the, you see that you're on the high score of this near the bottom, but you're there. And now, all of a sudden you have this next thing. Oh, I could do better still. Is it true that the high scores were mostly made up? This is a conspiracy theory I've seen. Oh, I mean, I mean, of the numbers, but most of the names were actual historical names. Got it. OK, but it was just you just made a high score list that people weren't on to make them want to play more. It's kind of genius and kind of devious. I love it. Like an unreachable high scoreboard. It's such a brutal thing to do to gamers. I love it. Philip, you wrote at one point that when you read the game, your goal was to save five things. And you said it was hunting, the risk of dying, resource management, random events, and purchasing supplies. And I think we've talked about all of these so far except hunting. And I know you did a bunch of work on upgrading hunting for this game. And it is, it's kind of the first live interactive thing about Oregon Trail, right?

32:44It's the first thing where you're actually actively moving something around the screen. Was that a big project to get going? Yes. And part of the issue was that unlike the rest of the game, which we could program in basic using free built subroutines, display text and display graphics, we had to program the entire hunting game in assembly language. So we had to bring in another team member, Roger Shimada, to program that. Although Bob Granvin created a real quick prototype and basic just to show the movement of the hunter. I worked with Bob and particularly with, oh, I was done, Grins, to plan out the character and how the character would move. But we did a lot of experimentation along the way. It was a big question up front. What should we do first person or third person? And we went with the third person approach where your character is on the screen and you move it around. And it does take some learning and some agility to figure out how to manipulate all those keys to move the character around.

33:45Because there's no mouse. So you have to use the keyboard to do, to move the character in different directions, start walking, stop walking, shoot all the while, animals are moving around and there are obstacles in the way that intercept your bullets. So that was a lot of fun to develop, but it was also required research because I wanted even that to be educational. So the animals you encounter along the way vary according to where you are. The landscape elements you encounter along the way vary according to where you are. And even the issue about only being able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon with a subtle educational bit of information. Yeah, it was a very funny thing to encounter playing this version of the game because it really does, it feels like a completely separate game dropped in at intervals to Oregon Trail, which it sounds like technically speaking, it basically was. You built another game and just sort of turn it on at the right moments throughout your Oregon Trail experience, which is really, it's kind of what hunting felt like throughout the game. It's like, I've done math problems.

34:47Now let's shoot some stuff and then we'll get back to math problems. Again, as a kid, very fun. Like, that was the reward almost for playing some amount of the game. I'm fascinated to learn about some of the other mini games that you guys prototyped and didn't make it in. That was one of the pieces of the history. I had no idea. And you can imagine a world in which the game is a bunch of mini games. You know, I've dotted between these simulations that are running, but how did that go about? Well, in particular, I wanted to get two other games in there. I wanted to have, depending upon which route you took from the last 90 miles from the dolls down to Oregon City, whether you took the Columbia River Valley or the Barlow Road, I wanted to have a game representing each of those two routes. And we eventually got in a very rudimentary version of the Columbia River Rafting game, not nearly as big as what we originally hoped. And the Barlow Road game, which was supposed to be a puzzle

35:48game, dealing with the real issue of getting over this very difficult route, which required pulleys and ropes and levers and how you're getting your wagon over these steep hills and valleys. That one never made it in. It just ran out of space, ran out of time. Were those the two limiting factors, I was actually going to ask which of those was a bigger problem? Because if I, if I remember right, you basically did this whole thing in 10 months and on a pretty old, even at that point, computer, was one or the other of those things the bigger problem or was it really the delightful combination of the two? It was both. The space on the disk and the space in RAM was extremely limiting. We had 64K of RAM in that computer. And part of that space was devoted to the display RAM. Part of it was devoted to the operating system. Part of it was devoted to system variables. So we really had a very small amount of space to put in all cram and all these things we needed to have available at any given time in RAM. And then the floppy disk, 140K on each side,

36:50including the operating system. There just wasn't much. It was so limited. For instance, I would have loved when you talked to people at landmarks. There's 48 monologues you can get engaged with people. We couldn't put in graphics for those monologues, which is not space for them. So space limitation was number one. But also, unlike the other products Mecha done at this time, which were you tried to design everything up front, kind of the waterfall method, I wanted to pursue an approach whereby we're constantly building what's most important at this moment and then prioritizing what's left. And a lot of things, so things are dropping off all along the way. But even by the time we got halfway through it, and we had to drop everything else, there was several things I really would have liked to have included that just didn't make it in there. Did you, like, keep a list? They're like, when we get to the next rev of this, we're going to really blow it out and do Oregon Trail, right? I mentioned the Barlow Road game.

37:52I really wanted to include bargaining with people that you meet along the way. This would be a real good way to talk to Native Americans, because a lot of them were basically involved in entrepreneurship. They come to these different places to trade with people. And there was also trappers and mountain men and soldiers. I wanted to attract the health of the oxen. The game kind of implies bad water and insufficient grass, but then it never actually does anything with that, because we didn't build them the oxen health model. There was one that, what a bit of a nice, was called the Good Samaritan option, where you encounter people along the way who are in distress, and you can help them. And by doing so, it doesn't actually help you get Oregon, but it gives you more points in the end. It's more rewarded in the end, you might say. Carmel points. It's a real luxury. Yeah, and it really would have liked to have a more robust Columbia River game. And that's the top of the list, but there were other things too.

38:53Yeah, that's really interesting. And so, but you were given a pretty hard deadline, right? So you're like, you have until, whenever it was in 1985, to have this game done, because we are getting it out. Was it, was it as hard and fast as it sounds? Not completely. So when I originally started, when we started in October, I optimistically said, oh, we probably finished by the end of March. That is optimistic. We finished at the end of July. Even that's pretty fast. So it was October to July, and it was a hard deadline, because it already made a deal to distribute, with the first distributor, that they were going to get the disk on at the end of July. So that was the real hard deadline. And I appreciate that Mac gave me enough wiggle room that I could continue to make it better up through the end of July. Chris, I think the history of gaming suggests that three months later is nothing. Yeah. There was something about this early era of game development where it was a handful of people making software in a room.

39:56And then it, you know, within a generation got far more complex than that in just 10, 15 years later. You know, we were talking about the timeline from 71 to 85. The next 14 years, right, would be a wildly curved up complex complication for gaming. And I think, you know, audience growth accessibility, right? These things, this game being in your home. These things all change. I think one of the things I didn't clock or didn't really understand as a kid when I played this is that that hardware restriction of making a game in 1985 limited to the technology of an Apple II is wild. Yeah. And it was a hit still, right? It was still sort of omnipresent. And, you know, I don't know if you see a lot of that again. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. The screen itself was also a huge limitation on what we could design. It had a screen resolution of 192 by 280. Only six colors and limitations on what colors of pixels

40:56could go side by side. So it was so little we could put on the screen at any given time. Yeah. I will say the art style going back and replaying it. Like some of that simplicity of it is so iconic, right? It just looks like organ trail. It has such a clear aesthetic. I think that the fact that people are still buying t-shirts with the wagon icon on it. Like, did I get it is benefits from that simplicity, which is maybe part of its charm at that time. So this is actually the last thing about this version of the game, Philip, that I want to talk about. And I pulled a bunch of screenshots of what's called the travel screen, which is, I think, we've spent a lot of time on this version of the game because I think, frankly, this screen in this version of the game is organ trail. Like when you close your eyes and imagine organ trail, generations of people imagine this thing. Philip, I want to know about this screen because I suspect figuring out what to do

41:57when nothing is happening is a very strange part of game design. And I wonder if you can tell us how this screen came to be. All right. I originally envisioned this screen occurring on a large graphic with no animation, just a still graphic showing the landscape you were passing through at that time, with that data information on the bottom half. So we built that for the alpha version that we brought to our first kid test, the whole several classrooms of kids that cycle through the game during the day. And we found that my original conception of the game did not interest them. The changing data on this screen did not engage them, the still graphic, the sit in there, did not engage them. So we realized, all right. This is a screen we got to fix. I still need the data. How are we going to put interest in this screen? And it turned out, one of my colleagues who wasn't even on the organ trail team came by while several of us were standing around brainstorming.

43:00And this particular guy, Bill Wei, was known for his little animations. And he said, well, why don't you just put up a little auction wagon and have it travel across the screen? And we said, let's give that a try. But even that, from that idea, it took like six or seven iterations and adding details to this before we got the animation the way we liked it with all the different elements that you see on the screen. But once we did, that was to not to be one of the biggest hooks of the product. Who designed the oxen the wagon? Sheryl and Kalinger was our graphic designer. And she did 99% of the graphics on the product. I will take credit for the curly queue on the big curly queue across the top on the main screen. But otherwise, Sheryl and all the rest of the credit. That's very good. I mean, Chris, am I right for thinking that is sort of the look of organ trail? I just want to say I feel called out as somebody who's in the same age demographic that would have been in your playtests.

44:02And I think about kids today and their attention spans and they can't pay attention to anything. And somewhere in 1985 was a version of me looking at a screen and saying it's too boring. There's two more happening. Nothing's happening. Let's see some ox move in or something. This is moved. And then the ox moves and I'm like, I'm into it now. Yeah, now I'm into it. This is good. The wheels are turning. This is good stuff. So Philip, tell me about the early reception to this game because obviously now, like again, we've spent a lot of time on this version of the game because it is the version of the game, frankly. Was it a gigantic immediate success when it came out? The first time it was there was very much the goal was to do a hugely successful education product and really break into the home market. Did it hit right away? The toward answer is yes. With one limitation was that the people who were most excited about it were the teachers in the schools. We had our annual met conference in November,

45:02which was just a couple of months after the product came out. And then we told the teachers, oh, we're only selling this to the home. We're not selling it to the schools. And we had essentially a rebellion on our hands. You know, they did. But I had designed it up from the beginning with the idea that, oh, I bet we'll have sought the schools to eventually. And sure enough, we did. A few months later, we started selling copies that was the school with additional, different packaging and teacher materials. And then we also then opened up the site licenses to include Oregon Trail. And once that happened, it just bloomed all over North America. Schools all over the place were making copies of it under the site licenses and became the most distributed, for a while, the most distributed product, educational and software product in North America. Yeah, and it seems like that, again, you can just put all of this right next to the personal computing revolution that's happening at the same time. And I think it's fascinating to me that I don't think either one gets credit

46:02for the other one, if that makes sense. They just happen to be happening at the exact right moment that all of a sudden you have all of these people with new access to computers in a new place and this shockingly fun game that they might have played at school, that all of a sudden there is something to do on the computer even at home. And then the computer starts to get better and more people get them. And these things just sort of cycle after each other for kind of a long time. But the strangest thing about this to me is the Oregon Trail peak kind of ends here. The game lives a long time. The game still lives a long time, but I think there are lots of versions. Mech goes public after being bought by VZVerm, goes public, gets bought by a company called SoftKey, which Kevin O'Leary was the CEO of Weird, that's all very strange. That becomes the learning company. A new version of Oregon Trail comes out that is kind of the bunch of games that are all collectively game.

47:03They spawn other games, Amazon Trail is a game. I remember deeply, which was basically, Philip, to your point, the Columbia River mini game, super fun. They just made a whole game out of it. And you're just on the Amazon River. It's great. I have no notes. But it does feel like, and I'm curious if either of you disagree with this. It feels like that 85 game, which lasted a while and was around and popular and played for a long time, was the biggest moment of Oregon Trail. And maybe for Chris, it's for the reasons you were talking about that gaming in general is exploding at this time, so there's just more to do. But why do you think this was as big as Oregon Trail ever really got in that sense? I think, and I thought about this a lot, doing research for this, and this idea of the Oregon Trail generation, which is like, I'm squarely smart, dab, and that. I think it was the permission to play a game at school. So part of it was that, when you first got computers at school

48:03and the software you had on those computers, and those memories and how it informed, what do we do? That was before a lot of us had computers at home. And so I think that there was just a sort of perfect window in the same way when they first created the game in 1971. There was just a moment in time when it was everything lined up right. And I think that this game hit for a certain generation, like a nuclear bomb, had this incredible massive impact. And then everyone moved on, right? They did something else. And there was these attempts by Mac and others to sort of keep it alive. There's Oregon Trail 2, but I think the original 1985 version still stands so much bigger than any of these other alternatives based on that outsized initial impact. Philip, does that sound right to you? I think it does. As you say, the right time, the time. There is also an issue though, when you have products that were successful in the 80s.

49:05And teams are assigned to redevelop them. And it's tough to keep focus on the user. So often when you see the games that were redeveloped, there is more emphasis on how can we augment things? How can we add more of this, more of that? I'm not talking just about Oregon Trail. I'm talking about Carmen San Diego. I'm talking about a lot of different things that were popular in the 80s. And keeping sight on what is going on in the head of the users, what engages them, what is going to make this a truly fun, interesting game, as well as educational, if it's supposed to be educational. And that's hard to do. Yeah, it's a good point. And there are a huge number of those games from that era that I remember so fondly, but have not really thought about ever since. And it's just a fascinating thing. And actually, I mean, to your point about the memes, this game right now is so much bigger culturally

50:07than it is as a video game. As far as I can tell, the phrase you died of dysentery, not a real thing, right? This is not a thing that occurs in the game Oregon Trail. That's true. It's sort of a misquote, but it captures the idea. Okay. So in the original game, there was no mention of specific diseases along the way. Disease and accidents were the main causes of death on this game. In fact, one of the things I set up front is that to an extent, the original first generation game helped promote the idea that death by attacks was one of the most common form of death along the way. And in fact, no, that was not. It was at hardly occurred at all. Death by accidents, death by disease. Those were the principal things. So that was a huge shift in second generation products that I designed. And I came up with five diseases that were often mentioned in the diaries. Some of them had names that were a little bit too long to fit on the screen.

51:07I had to condense them a little bit. But dysentery was one of the five I included. And it was the only one that caught the popular imagination. But to answer your question directly, it will say, Zik has dysentery. And a few moments later, it'll say, Zik has died. Right. So it's always so matter of fact, which is one of the things that just makes me laugh. It just goes, Zik has died. And then you just keep going. But OK, sorry, Zik. I love that in the popular consciousness, though, it's just been contracted. It's just been shortened to, you know, you have died of dysentery. That's what we all remember dying of dysentery. But do you think that the way that this game is still so embedded in people's minds is because it is of that moment. It was this special thing. It's the thing that you're describing that people had this sort of unique early computer experience with. The sense that for a certain cohort of people, this game had an outsized impact on how they experience computing in games.

52:09And like technology in the classroom, right? Collecting cereal box tops for Apple twos. Like all this stuff, like this was all related to this feeling. Again, as somebody who grew up, I went to elementary school in the mid 80s, that there was a possibility space that technology was enabling, that you were learning in a different way. I think there was a really fascinating conversation to be had about the idea of the feeling that education would be forever transformed by games like Oregon Trail. We will learn this way all the time now. We will learn everything through the lens of gaming. And that really has not been the case at all. Yeah. OK, one more thing I want to talk about before we get to the version history questions about this, which is I think there's a version of this game you can play now. If you want to go to Apple Arcade, there's still an Oregon Trail out there. They've made a lot of strides to make the game more inclusive over time. They've made the game, I think, more accurately represent Native Americans in particular.

53:11But the thing I was most struck by in researching this is that it doesn't appear that the sort of structure and thinking and the way that Oregon Trail works. All of the stuff that we've been talking about, the sort of resource management stuff, has permeated games elsewhere. Like, I am admittedly the least game scholarly of the three of us. So I want to put it to the two of you. Can you look at games now and see Oregon Trail's sort of direct influence in that sense? Chris, maybe I'm curious to hear your thoughts first. People say red dead redemption is the one game when you bring up Oregon Trail people go red dead. Yeah, I mean, is that just because it's in their Northwest? Yeah. I think mechanically, in the same way that they originally, the original programmer identified the simulation mechanics right away, seeing the board game version on the butcher paper, I think games naturally lend themselves to that kind of mechanic.

54:11Sure. But I also think it's strange that we don't see as much almost direct reference or shared language of vernacular in current games that we would put this. And some of that's the text of it all. Text of venture games were a great way to teach kids to read and like to get them picking up on language at that age. One of the issues I ran into in the later in the 80s and throughout the 90s was trying to explain to my colleagues how I perceive the difference between resource management simulations and adventure games. They kept calling it referring to Oregon Trail's an adventure game. And I said, well, yeah, it is an adventure. But from a technical standpoint, an adventure game is based on Boolean variables. You have the key or you don't. The door opens or the door is closed. And the whole collection of these Booleans and there's one way through the game. And that's it. Once you've done it, no point doing it again. The Oregon Trail, though, being real values,

55:14over a bunch of different resource boxes, you have a goal you're trying to achieve while remaining alive. And it's and there's many ways to succeed. So it's a very different beast to me than an adventure game. Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Okay, and then last question. It's 2026, the gaming industry, tough times, is the solution, a AAA fully rebooted, big as you can possibly get Oregon Trail. Could we do it again and hit it now? I'm going to say, I think big AAA mega budget reboots of anything in 2026 and on are cooked. So no, that's not what it meant. That's not what it meant. That's not what it meant. Well, maybe a Roblox game where you do an Oregon Trail alike inside of Roblox. Sure. All right, I like this idea. Phillip, you want to run it? We're back in. We're starting this up again. Well, I think it would be fascinating.

56:14And it also brings up the question of if I had been asked at different times since in these past 40 years, what would I do differently? The answer is different every five years because of the changing world and the changing technology. And in any case, I think it would be a lot of fun to lead a team doing this, but I would caution against throwing too much money at it. I think we would do better to have a somewhat limited budget and carefully choose what we do. I'm going to fill up. I'll put together a prospectus and we'll get started. All right. I'm confident we could raise money for this. I'm not worried about it at all. All right, let's take one more break. And then we're going to do the version history questions. I'll figure this thing out once we're all. We'll grab back.

57:26This episode is brought to you by Chat GPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons podcast. Have you guys heard about Chat GPT work? It's the new way to use Chat GPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, you have Chat GPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on plus and pro plans. All right, we're back. So as always, we ask the same eight questions about every product to evaluate where it fits in history. The first version history question is called the Time Matrix. It's very simple. It makes perfect sense to everybody. And the idea behind the Time Matrix is we plot idea versus time. Was this the right idea at the right time? Was it the wrong idea at the wrong time? Was it somewhere in between? I suspect we're all going to very quickly agree on this one, but Philip, I want to know what you think first.

58:28I think it was the right idea at more than one time because with the 70s and the 80s, at the very least, and even when it came out in 95, so very well. Yeah, I mean, I went immediately to it was the right idea at the right time. Mega hard cosine. Yeah, okay. I think it for all the reasons we've been talking about it. We're all lightening on a bottle stuff. Yeah, and hard to replicate. And you could not brute force it the way that it worked. Good, it's an easy one, right place, right time. Version history question number two, was this peak anything? Was this the best we ever had of anything? I will offer you a couple, and then I'm curious if you guys have any. Was this peak educational games? Yes. I think so, right? I can't think of anything with, again, the possible exception of Carmen Sandiego, which we've talked about. I can't think of anything that people played in school computer labs that they loved this much for this long. Philip, would you agree? Yes, and I would also say it was peak of the idea that we could educate with computer games.

59:30Yeah. The by the 90s, it was already starting to shift more towards managed instruction. Back, which was back with Maconcept from the 60s, kind of came back and kind of gave up on using computer games for instruction. Interesting. Chris, do you think that's true? I think that's true. Yeah, we walked away from it after this. There have been all sorts of efforts, and there's the games for change festivals, et cetera, but none of them have ever hit the high highs of 1980s organ trail. Yeah, fair enough. That was a good one. Was this peak Apple II? I think there are a bunch of Apple fans out there who are not going to like that, but I think it might have been. I mean, on the advent of Apple moving in the direction of the Mac, et cetera, like, yeah, this has got to be, I would guess the most played piece of software on Apple II. It would be hard to imagine otherwise. Philip, what do you think? You were much more engaged with the Apple II at the time. You can give yourself some credit here. You personally made the Apple II happen, I think. Well, the organ trail helped,

1:00:31and number of munchers, which I did with the lead designer on also. Yeah. I continued to develop for the Apple II for another six or seven years, but it was a fading machine. Interesting. Another argument for right place, right time. I just want to point out the subtle flex there of saying number munchers, which I also designed. Right? Right, like another. Number munchers. Another class, a week ago, done a whole episode about number munchers. And we'll come back to that. Anything else was organ trail? The pinnacle of anything else in its day, do you think? It was easily the number one way that kids learned what dysentery was. Speak dysentery. Yeah, speak dysentery. I mean, it's true. It is the best thing that has ever been associated with dysentery. I think we can safely say. Right, version history question number three. If you could time travel back and develop it yourself, could you make the product more successful? We have an unusually direct line to the answer to this one in that Philip, you are here. So I want to start with you. If you could go back to 1984 yourself and whisper something in your ear

1:01:32about how to make organ trail better or easier or more successful, what would it be? Well, there were several little tweaks I would want to make if I could go back to 85, you know, when we were wrapping it up. But we'd already maxed out the space on the desk, maxed out the space on the in the RAM. So all I could do would be relatively small tweaks. If I had been offered a year later, the opportunity to augment the product by allowing to be distributed on the three and a quarter inch floppy, three and a half inch floppy, which has 800 kilobytes, then I could have put in the graphics for talking to people. I could put in perhaps an improved drafting game. We could, maybe possibly get it from that trading in. Would you go back and tell yourself to try and buy 12 months and ship the game in 86 and said seriously, like if you're like, I could have finished the vision given another year, should you have asked for another year? No, I think I would have asked for an opportunity

1:02:33to do organ trail deluxe, which was the same game but with improvements. Okay, I like that. I would have played that one too. I got a galaxy brain idea. Okay. The hunting game instead of a third person camera, first person camera, you invent the first person shooter, a solid six seven years before Wolfenstein 3D. And that's it. And again, Philip, what do you think? Did we just, did we all just become billionaires? We discussed early on in the product, whether we do the first person or third person, and we just thought, we're gonna be biting off more than we can chew if we try to do first person at this time. But then we ended up hiring, using a simply language program or anyway. So maybe we could have. My idea was gonna be just lift the hunting game out and sell it separately. Like give me space invaders, but it's organ trail hunting all the time. Okay. I'm in forever. I don't have it. Yeah, I think it would work. All right, I love this. Question number four was this product correctly named. If we could go back either to 71 when they first called it

1:03:36organ or at any point along the way, could it have ever had a better name than organ trail? I'm gonna say proofs in the pudding and that we're doing a podcast here in the year 2026 talking about organ trail. And I think it's all some of its parts. I think organ would not have hit the same way. I think the kids as sort of a path of desire, right? Called it what it was. It's a game about organ trail. So I think it's perfect and a hard one. Philip, did you ever have the chance to change the name if you had wanted to, could you have? I wouldn't have changed the name. Until the version I designed came out, Mac never actually sold a product called the organ trail. It sold the original Apple to version was called elementary volume six or social studies volume two. And I had several simulations on it. But from 1981 to 1984 when we started this project, people were joking that Mac was really the organ trail company. So that name was really solid.

1:04:37That was the name we had to go with. All right, question number five. What feature of this should every current version have? Chris, I want you to go first. And I want you to lift something out of organ trail and make it a mainstream gaming thing again. I love a game to this day that has real challenge, real complexity, a high rate of failure. I think especially for young people, kind of something such an old person. I apologize to everyone that's something for kids these days. But I think that having games that encourage you to get better and try again and give you a sort of feedback loop that teaches you what to do. It's great. There's a lot of games that do this very popular. We talked about dark souls before. But I think there's tons of games these days that are low nutrition. They're just dopamine seeking and you just play them and it's not about the challenge. It's about sort of getting things.

1:05:40And so the thing I like the most about organ trail and the thing that I love seeing in games and would love to see more of this sense of real consequence to the decisions you make and the encouragement and feedback to go again. Yeah, that's a good one. Philip, what about you? I'm going to mention something that's a bit subtle, which is this idea of advanced organizers that the organ trail exposes you to various terms and concepts that kind of stick with you. So later on, when you hear about Columbia River, oh yeah, we raffed down the Columbia River or here, chimney rock. Well, in fact, when I visited chimney rock, Ranger there said, oh, thank you for including that in the game because it's driving most of our visitors even now, decades later. So these advanced organizers drive curiosity and enable further learning later on. I've heard that term. I've seen that concept. Now I'm curious when I'm exposed to it again. I like that. I love that. My answer was going to be, I think the game is the absolute perfect length that I think you very rarely

1:06:43die immediately. So you don't have that sort of, I try a thing over and over and over and it doesn't work kind of frustration that you get with a lot of games. But there's also no version of it that is hours and hours and hours and hours. That it's like, it's somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes most of the time. And that is, I think that is perfect. And many more games should give you a loop at about that length. Peak school, ab time. That's a thing. Yes. Peak fourth period. Yep. Very much so. All right. Now we have the three version history Hall of Fame questions. Any product has to pass all three of these tests to get into the version history Hall of Fame. I suspect I know how this is going to go. Hall of Fame question number one, did this product do something truly new? Yes. I think that I actually think it's a pretty easy one. Philip, you were sort of in that space even more. But I think my sense is both in 71 and then again in 85, it's not like the folks working on this game were competing with a bunch of other people

1:07:44building very similar things at the same time. This was new at a couple of different junctures. Correct. We were really trying something different, both 71 and 85. Yeah. OK. All right. Well, easy pass on that one. Hall of Fame question number two, was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? Yes. I think both for 71 and 85, right? This is a game that stood out in a way that endures today. So for me, that's an easy yes, especially in the 85 one with the size of the audience. Yeah. Yeah. I think I agree. Philip, you're a little biased on this one. But if you want to say the game is terrible, now is your chance. Oh, I liked it. But my cast was when I brought it to my father. See what he thought. And he was, I didn't see him for the next 48 hours. He kept playing over and over and over again. And he said he wasn't going to stop until he beat Steve and meek on the high-score list. So that's about all you need to hear on that one.

1:08:48OK. And then I think this one might actually be the trickiest one in this case. Hall of Fame question number three, did it change history? Is there a world before and after this game? Right after I just said, I think that it's long-term influence on sort of current gaming vernacular is not clear. But then I also think that, I mean, for a crime of law, there's a sentiment, the idea of a organ-trailed micro-generation, the sense that it has a demographic cohort who share the history and experience of it. Like that is historical. Right? It feels very much. I'll also say I'm a voting judge on the video game Hall of Fame. Organ Trail was a contender for year one, the very first group of games. I will confess here to Philip. This is my confession. My number one pick was doom. I'm sorry, doom.

1:09:50I still think it's the most important video game I've ever made. But year two, Organ Trail in the world of the game Hall of Fame. So historically, all the nerds that vote on that and sort of determine which games have real long-term historical value, there are few games above Organ Trail on that list. I tend to agree. I actually think this one is, the part of me that pauses on this is the part of me that says, like, I don't know how obvious its fingerprints are in other games everywhere. Whereas like a game like doom is still everywhere. But I still think that the moment that it was and the way that it got so many new people thinking about games and frankly computers in different kinds of ways, it's like if the argument is, did this bend the universe a little bit? I think the answer is yes. Philip, what do you think on this front? I know I'm asking you to basically litigate your own career legacy at this moment, but I am curious how it feels looking back at it.

1:10:52At the time we created it, our goal was to have a very successful product, to have it be basically replace mechs, best product, or best known product, which was the earlier version. And we succeeded beyond our goals, in fact. But I assumed that six or seven years later, nobody would remember it. It would be very successful for a short period of time and then just disappear. So the fact that so many people remember it now, to me, it's the big surprise and the best and for Chris's argument, that the best argument that this is indeed a game changer of some sort. Yeah, I tend to agree. I came into this episode knowing this was going to be an easy one into the Hall of Fame. And I think it's right. I feel good about it. All right, well, Oregon Trail. And I guess by extension, you, Philip Husshard, welcome to the version history Hall of Fame. Oh, thank you. This is big. Thank you both so much for reading this. This has been tremendously fun. I'm grateful to have gotten to go through this with all of you guys.

1:11:53Also, for anyone who doesn't know, you can play basically every version of this game online somewhere. There's a website called You Have Diet of Dissentery that has a bunch of old versions. Delightful. Can I recommend playing through all the versions of this game enough? But truly, thank you both so much for being here. This has been really fun. That's us with it. Thank you, Philip, for making Oregon Trail. Yeah. A whole generation of kids grew up trolling themselves, trolling each other, dying of Dissentarity. And it holds up in a way that it, frankly, has no business holding up after 40 years. And thanks to my colleagues who were good, because there were several of us who played important roles in the creation of this game. And thank you so much for inviting me. I enjoyed talking with you, David and Chris very much. All right. And thank you, as always, to everybody for watching and listening. The best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to the verge, the verge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of Oregon Trail and whatever weird games Chris is into and everything else. Thank you so much for being here. We will see you next time. This episode is brought to you by Chat GPT.

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