1001 Games To Play Before You Die: #0001 Oregon Trail

Thursday, May 22, 2014

#0001 Oregon Trail

Alright! Our quest begins with an admittedly surprising first entry. Oregon Trail. Yeah, you know that game you used to play in elementary school? Teachers thought it was educational, but you just played it so you could name your character Kenny and make him die of starvation? Yeah, the first version of this game was released in 1971! Making it even older than Pong.

Developed Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971, and then aquired by MECC in 1974, and has then been releaseing sequals and remakes for the game ever since, making it the longest running game series in history!

In this game you play as a wagon leader and must move his family from Independence Missouri to

Willamette Valley, Oregon via Covered Wagon. That's over 2000 miles, or, 3219 Km that'd be quite a rough move even today with our moving vans, cars and such. But in 1848, traveling such a distance was almost unheard of, there was a good chance that you could DIE from such a journey. And... You usually do. I mean, it's actually really hard to play this game and NOT have one of your family die from measles, or a snakebite, or dysentery, or typhoid, or cholera, or exhaustion, or starvation, or drown in a river because you decided it would be a good idea to just try and float your waggon across the snake river to save a couple bucks on a ferry.

See, this is another aspect of the game, decision making. From the very beginning you must make decisions that will effect the entire course of the game. Do you pack tons of supplies to ensure that you're comfortable? Or do you pack light to enable faster traveling? Do you leave in march to reach Oregon before winter? Or do you leave later to try and avoid the crowded trails? No matter what you choose it's safe to bet that it'll be no cake walk. In my journey, I decided to buy 8 Oxen to make sure that I could lose a couple and still be more than okay. But before I even reached the first land mark a thief stole ALL of them. My only option was to wait until someone was kind enough to trade me a couple oxen so I could make it to the next town and buy more. That's honestly where this game shines. In it's dificulty. It really makes you think about how hard it might have been for people traveling to the west.

Overall, this game is absolutely phenomenal for it's time. Considering that It came out a full year before Pong, yet it has graphics that even the Atari 2600 could later have a hard time replicating, along with fairly complex game mechanics that make you really feel like you're traveling the west. It's such a good game that I don't know a single person that did not grow up playing it. All in all, I'd recommend that you go and give it a shot, but let's be honest, you probably already have.

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Why I'm taking this challenge

So! I’ve spent nearly my entire life as a Nintendo Fanboy. A rabid fanboy to the point where when my family got a brand new Playstation 2 back in ‘02 (One of the best consoles ever). I refused to play it. I refused to have anything to do with the company that stole my beloved Nintendo’s thunder! This fanboyism ran rampant in my gaming life through high school and even when I moved out to live with the woman who would one day become my wife. I still didn’t play anything but Nintendo consoles. In fact, it wasn’t until we were gifted an Xbox 360 did I FINALLY play a game on a different console. That was Bioshock, it was also the first shooter I had ever played.It became one of my favorite games of all time. The rest is history, I’ve been playing games on any console I want now.

That’s all well and good, but this means that there is an entire other gaming WORLD that I’ve never played. Never experienced in my life. I love shooters, but with the exception of the half-life series, and System shock 2, every shooter from Doom all the way up until Bioshock, I’ve never played. Not Quake, not CoD, not battlefield.

So, since I’ve missed out on nearly 30 years of gaming, I decided to take a challenge. My lovely wife got me a book called 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die I am going to play through every game in this book. Starting with Oregon Trail (1971) and finish with Bioshock Infinite (2013) I plan to do at least one generation per year. At least. And to help me keep track of what I've done, I started doing small reviews of every game.

At first I wrote these in the starment.net forums, but eventually they became too lengthy to only be posted there, so I created this blog to not only help keep me organized, but so others can follow along as well. It won't be easy, but I think it's worth it to play games that I may otherwise never have played.