How three student teachers wrote The Oregon Trail in two weeks
Don Rawitsch was a history major at Carleton College, student teaching an eighth grade class at Jordan Junior High School in Minneapolis in the fall of 1971. He had sketched a board game about the westward migration on his apartment floor, with hand-drawn routes and event cards. His roommates Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, who both had programming experience, told him it would work better as a computer program.
The three wrote it in about two weeks in HP Time-Shared BASIC, on a teletype terminal wired to an HP 2100 minicomputer shared by the Minneapolis school district. There were no graphics, no sound and no save files. A player typed how much to spend on oxen, food and ammunition, picked a pace and a ration level, and the teletype printed the consequences on paper.
Rawitsch's class played it on December 3, 1971. "We spent a week on Oregon Trail, and so [the students] had four or five days to try it out," Rawitsch told Slate in 2021, describing a room that was, against the usual run of history homework, genuinely excited. When the unit ended he printed the source code and deleted the program from the minicomputer.
Why MECC turned a classroom program into a national standard
Minnesota created the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, known as MECC, in 1973 to put computing in front of students across the state. Rawitsch joined MECC in 1974 and, over the Thanksgiving break that year, retyped the 1971 listing line by line into the consortium's time-sharing system from the printout he had kept.
What followed was distribution rather than marketing. MECC supplied Apple II machines to Minnesota schools in volume and shipped its software catalog alongside the hardware, and The Oregon Trail sat at the front of that catalog. Teachers did not have to buy it separately or argue a case for it. It arrived with the computer.
The money followed the reach. By 1995 The Oregon Trail accounted for roughly one third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue, according to The Strong National Museum of Play, and MECC had gone public in 1994, raising $22 million. A state education cooperative had built the most valuable property in American educational software almost by accident.
What did the 1985 Apple II version actually change?
The version most Americans picture is the 1985 Apple II release, and it is the one that put the wagon on screen: a covered wagon crawling across green country, a hunting screen, river crossings you could ford or caulk or ferry, and the tombstone messages that outlived the software. "You have died of dysentery" escaped the game entirely and became a punchline for a generation that met computers in a school lab.
Under the pictures, the 1985 design was close to the 1971 one. Money at the general store in Independence, Missouri, bought oxen, food, clothing, ammunition and spare parts. Pace and rations traded speed against health. Rivers were the gamble. Nothing in it was a quiz, and that was the point: students learned the arithmetic of scarcity by running out of things.
The design aged better than the presentation did. Set it next to the shareware boom that Doom set off in 1993 and The Oregon Trail looks slow and quiet. It held its audience anyway, because for years it was the game the computer lab was actually licensed to run.
How Mattel's $3.8 billion blunder scattered the rights
In October 1995 SoftKey International agreed to buy MECC for $370 million in stock. SoftKey was buying everything in educational software that year. It also took over a rival called The Learning Company and then adopted its name.
Mattel announced on December 14, 1998 that it would buy The Learning Company in a stock deal valued at about $3.8 billion, and closed it in May 1999. Chief executive Jill Barad wanted a route into high-tech toys. Instead the software division lost roughly $105 million after tax in the third quarter of 1999, against the $50 million profit Mattel had forecast, and the share price went with it.
Barad resigned in February 2000. That October Mattel handed The Learning Company to Gores Technology Group for effectively no cash up front, keeping a share of future profits instead, and estimates of Mattel's total loss on the deal run as high as $3.6 billion. The catalog kept moving after that, to Riverdeep in 2001 and on to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The Oregon Trail survived all of it as a line item in somebody else's balance sheet.
Is The Oregon Trail still available in 2026?
Yes, and it is still sold new. The brand sits with HarperCollins: HarperCollins Productions, the publisher's licensing arm, lists The Oregon Trail among the franchises it manages, and Gameloft builds the current game under that license. HarperCollins bought Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's consumer books and media business for $349 million in 2021.
Gameloft's remake launched on Apple Arcade in April 2021 and was the service's most downloaded game that year. It reached Steam, Windows and Nintendo Switch on November 14, 2022, and Xbox Series X and S in August 2023. List price is $29.99.
The old versions are still around too. The Internet Archive runs the 1990 MS-DOS release in a browser emulator, free, with no download and no account, which is the fastest way to show a child what the tombstone screen looked like. Anyone who would rather have the DOS original running on their own machine can take the same route as running 90s PC games on Windows 11.
Formal recognition arrived in 2016, when The Strong National Museum of Play inducted The Oregon Trail into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in the same class as The Sims. "The Oregon Trail is perhaps the oldest continuously available video game ever made," said Jon-Paul Dyson, director of The Strong's International Center for the History of Electronic Games, in 2016. More than 65 million copies have sold across every version since 1971.
Where to find one today
Boxed MECC disks from the Apple II and DOS years are collector items now and turn up at retro shops rather than in stores, so the playable route in 2026 is digital. The Gameloft release lists at $29.99 on Steam and the Nintendo eShop, and Gameloft has also brought it to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which is the one to check if you want a DRM-free installer instead of a launcher.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you still play The Oregon Trail in 2026?
Yes. The Oregon Trail is still sold new in 2026: the Gameloft version lists at $29.99 on Steam and the Nintendo eShop, and it is included with Apple Arcade, where it launched in April 2021. The 1990 MS-DOS release also runs free in a web browser at the Internet Archive.
Who owns The Oregon Trail now?
HarperCollins holds The Oregon Trail brand in 2026, through HarperCollins Productions, and licenses it to Gameloft for the current game. The rights moved from MECC to SoftKey International in 1995, to Mattel with The Learning Company in 1999, and then through Gores Technology Group, Riverdeep and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, whose consumer books and media business HarperCollins bought for $349 million in 2021.
Who created The Oregon Trail, and when?
Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger wrote The Oregon Trail in HP Time-Shared BASIC in November 1971, while all three were students at Carleton College in Minnesota. Rawitsch's eighth grade class at Jordan Junior High School in Minneapolis played it on December 3, 1971.