Created In Northfield, 'The Oregon Trail' Video Game Turns 46

NORTHFIELD, MN — On Dec. 3, 1971, three students at Carleton College released a video game that become one of the most popular video games of all time.

Don Rawitsch and his roommates Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger were studying to become teachers. During his senior year at Carleton, Rawitsch worked as a student teacher and was tasked with teaching American history to Minneapolis eighth graders. With help from his two roommates, Rawitsch created "The Oregon Trail," an educational computer game that kids enjoyed playing.

The Oregon Trail predates personal computers. Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger had to write code for the game using a teletype machine connected to a mainframe computer via a phone line.

The game was specifically designed to teach children about 19th-century pioneer life. The player's main task is to successfully guide a group of settlers riding in a covered wagon from Missouri to Oregon. Activities on the journey included hunting and fishing as well as buying food and supplies.

The challenge was to keep the settlers from dying of dysentery and hunger, being robbed, drowning in rivers, and other common pitfalls of the period. Rawitsch told Forbes he researched actual diaries of pioneers before coding the probabilities of each dilemma. "You have died of dysentery" is now a popular meme and T-shirt.

After graduating college, Rawitsch, a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, was hired by the Minnesota Education Computing Consortium (MECC), an organization created by the Minnesota State Legislature. Rawitsch added Oregon Trail to MECC's library of programs, allowing the game to be played by students statewide.

The game took off from there. By the 1980s, teachers across the United States would call MECC to ask how to delete swear words from the game's virtual tombstones, according to the Minneapolis City Pages.

Since the 1970s, ten different versions of the game have been released. The Oregon Trail has sold more than 65 million copies worldwide and is the most widely distributed education game ever, City Pages reports.

You can now find the game on the iPhone and Android.

Photo credit: A Seattle Sounders fan holds up a sign referencing the video game "The Oregon Trail" prior to a MLS soccer match between the Sounders and the Portland Timbers, Sunday, Aug. 25, 2013, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)