As a young child in the public school system, one of my favorite memories from my elementary and middle school years was playing the now infamous computer game — The Oregon Trail.
Ironically enough, the game was first developed by Don Rawitsch, a history major at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. After graduating from college, Rawitsch was hired by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (or MECC as we all know it) and a few years later in 1985, the first version of the game was released for the Apple II computer (seen below).
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The setup of the game is fairly simple — players assume the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri to Oregon’s Willamette Valley (where I ironically call home today).