Brief history of The Oregon Trail videogame

[anon33932455]

As a kid I didn’t know what dysentery was, I just knew from the game I definitely didn’t ever want to get it.

[anon73430903]

@anon33932455

I’m pretty sure sure. We had the tall boxes of extra-wide printer paper and we’d go through 1 box or so every time we played. Each time you fired a photon torpedo it would print each and every quadrant that it passed through.

Ouch! That must get expensive quickly, and I won’t play modern MMORPGs because I think it will be too expensive.

My memory of games at school started with a copy of Elite on the BBC Micro that none of the teachers had found yet, and were unlikely to find because most of them were coming up to retirement age and weren’t used to this new machine that they were supposed to use.

[Mark_Sniadecki]

@anon33932455

Players attempt to disable or destroy their opponents’ ships in real-time combat, while taking over enemy planets by bombing them and dropping off armies they pick up on friendly planets. The goal of the game is to capture all the opposing team’s planets.

That’s just begging for a modern version. Like No Man’s Sky with team combat. Is there anything currently out there that combines ship-to-ship combat with that pickup/dropoff troop placement mechanic?

[DrearyUrbanite]

Ory-gun

[fnordius]

I recall playing Star Trek, Oregon Trail and Lunar Lander the same way, with a ribbon feed printer terminal that our school had, hooked up to some college’s mainframe. It was most likely expensive and wasteful in the eyes of the school admins, but we kids were enthralled. And it did start my career as a software developer. That, and being one of the first to have access to the new thing the school got called an Apple II and BASIC.

[anon33932455]

@fnordius

That, and being one of the first to have access to the new thing the school got called an Apple II and BASIC.

Yep, that was about it. The next year we had a Terak 8510 and I thought we were the hottest thing around. I have no idea how our little school in such a rundown area afforded it, but on reflection it was probably donated. We were in San Diego, so the hookup to UCSD and using the UCSD Pascal system was natural. Turn the monitor sideways to get 80 columns instead of 40, and you were the top of the pack!

Edit addition: When I got a IIe, my middle and high school teachers wouldn’t let me type up papers/reports on the computer because they considered the ability to cut-and-paste and go back and do edits before printing it “an unfair advantage” over other students. I had to use a typewriter,

[Yri]

Visitoregon.com put it on their website; you can play online here.

[James_Mason]

@anon33932455

Edit addition: When I got a IIe, my middle and high school teachers wouldn’t let me type up papers/reports on the computer because they considered the ability to cut-and-paste and go back and do edits before printing it “an unfair advantage” over other students. I had to use a typewriter,

How idiotic. I would have assumed the point was to learn how to write, not how to type. I imagine a significant % of the kids started writing with the typewriter and making it up along the way. Thus doing a poor job. Your way would be more like using note cards, or writing a draft and then marking it up…you know, like how you are SUPPOSED to write things.

Also - my Dad was a big Louis L’Amour fan and used to brag that was how Louis L’Amour would write his books - start with blank paper and fill it up. I tried to explain the potential problems and how it probably wasn’t true and it all fell on deaf ears.