The Oregon Trail is a computer game developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). The game was designed to teach schoolchildren about the dangers and challenges of traveling the Oregon Trail in the mid-19th century.

The original game was programmed on a mainframe computer and required players to print out copies of the game screen in order to play. In 1990, MECC released a new version of the game that could be played on personal computers. The updated game featured colorful graphics and sound effects, and allowed …