History VideoGame / TheOregonTrail

* EatTheDog: If you go for a while without food, you will get the option to slaughter an ox for meat. From ''Oregon Trail II'' on, if a draft animal dies, it can be butchered for meat.

* ''[[VideoGame/TheOregonTrail2021 The Oregon Trail]]'' (2021) -- Another remake by Gameloft for Platform/AppleArcade with a later 2022 port to Platform/NintendoSwitch, notable for including Indigenous travelers for the first time, with Gameloft going out of their way to make sure the representation is as accurate and respectful as possible

If you lived in the US and attended school from the [[TheEighties late 1980s]] through the TurnOfTheMillennium, and your classroom or school library was fortunate enough to have a monolithic, clicking heap of machinery called an UsefulNotes/AppleII, chances are you remember a little floppy-disc based game called ''The Oregon Trail''.

* ''The Oregon Trail'' (1985) -- For UsefulNotes/AppleII and first graphical version (playable [[https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/#oregon_trail_1 here]])

* ''The Oregon Trail'' (2011) -- For UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} and uses full 3D engine
* ''[[VideoGame/TheOregonTrail2021 The Oregon Trail]]'' (2021) -- Another remake by Gameloft for UsefulNotes/AppleArcade with a later 2022 port to UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, notable for including Indigenous travelers for the first time, with Gameloft going out of their way to make sure the representation is as accurate and respectful as possible

* ''[[VideoGame/TheOregonTrail2021 The Oregon Trail'' (2021)]] -- Another remake by Gameloft for UsefulNotes/AppleArcade with a later 2022 port to UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, notable for including Indigenous travelers for the first time, with Gameloft going out of their way to make sure the representation is as accurate and respectful as possible

** Partially inverted with ''Oregon Trail 3rd Edition'', which dropped the travel options added in ''Oregon Trail II'', reducing you again to just the Oregon Trail in 1848. Also, rather than making up your own wagon party from scratch, you have to choose your party members from some {{FMV}} people in Independence (similar to selecting a guide in ''VideoGame/TheAmazonTrail''). However, the same game added a FishingMinigame as well as a MiniGame for gathering edible plants. (In the original and ''Oregon Trail II'', finding edible plants was a RandomEvent.)

* ''[[VideoGame/TheOregonTrail2021 The Oregon Trail'' (2021)]] -- Another remake by Gameloft for the Apple Arcade with a later 2022 port to UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, notable for including Indigenous travelers for the first time, with Gameloft going out of their way to make sure the representation is as accurate and respectful as possible

If you were in the US and went to school from the [[TheEighties late 1980s]] through the TurnOfTheMillennium, and your classroom or school library was fortunate enough to have a monolithic, clicking heap of machinery called an UsefulNotes/AppleII, chances are you remember a little floppy-disc based game called ''The Oregon Trail''.

* Genius Bonus: If you go through Salt Lake City and decide to pay a visit, the background music is the Mormon hymn "Come, Come ye Saints”.

* StealthPun: If you go through Salt Lake City and decide to pay a visit, the background music is "Come, Come ye Saints”.

* ''The Oregon Trail'' (2021) -- Another remake by Gameloft for the Apple Arcade with a later 2022 port to UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, notable for including Indigenous travelers for the first time, with Gameloft going out of their way to make sure the representation is as accurate and respectful as possible

* ''The Oregon Trail'' (2021) -- Another remake by Gameloft for the Apple Arcade, notable for including Indigenous travelers for the first time, with Gameloft going out of their way to make sure the representation is as accurate and respectful as possible

* AdamSmithHatesYourGuts: Prices go up the farther along the trail you go. One of the people you talk to in the first game discusses this. Justified, given that supplies in the harsher wilderness would be harder to come by and cost more. Although, if you can haggle well, it is possible to buy supplies, go out of town, and resell them for more than you paid for them. The profit margins are still somewhat thin though, maybe 10-20% per transaction.

** Later releases would give you the option to request items while bartering, whereas the original would make random, take-it-or-leave-it offers until you lucked into someone who had what you needed. Granted, 9 times out of 10 you'd simply be told nobody had any [x] to spare, but at least it was an improvement.

** In ''II'', hunting accidents such as gunshot wounds or animal attacks appeared at random after hunting. If you weren't killed instantly, you would take turns for the worse until you died. In ''3rd Edition'', these were self-imposed and much less deadly. An accidental gunshot wound would happen if you shot before you reloaded your gun, and missing a snake or a bear would result in a snakebite or mauling, respectively.

* ArbitraryHeadcountLimit: Maximum of five people, six in the second version.
* BilingualBonus: In the second game, you can talk to characters who speak Spanish. If you can speak it, you don't have to learn it in-game to understand them.

** Also in the second and fifth versions, you can choose Salt Lake City as your destination and then choose to continue when you get there (as most people would). This basically means trying to make it through the freaking enormous Great Salt Lake Desert, and then crossing the Sierra Nevada. If you chose the exact same year (1846) as the Donner Party, you indeed get the exact same late October snowstorm they got stranded in. The game includes other historical freak weather/epidemics as well.

* DialogueTree: From the Mac version onwards, you can talk to various people at forts and landmarks, and their dialogue is in tree form. However, it doesn't have any effect on the game.

* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: The actual John Sutter was a nasty piece of work: he enslaved, raped, and/or killed hundreds of Native Americans, including children, and several contemporaneous observers (including the governor of the region) considered the conditions at Sutter's Fort brutal even for the 1840s. [=NPCs=] present him in a largely positive light.

* MagicAntidote: Some stuff like gradually warming frostbitten areas and [[SuckOutThePoison sucking out snake venom]] [[WorstAid (though the latter is not recommended in the modern era with a modern first aid kit)]] can actually work. Heck, ''peppermint'' actually really helps if you administer it to someone with cholera (the menthol actually eases the symptoms and allows the immune system to fight off the infection).

* ShownTheirWork: Characters can die very unexpectedly from gun shot wounds while hunting, drowning, or all manner of random ways, while also be constantly hampered by disease, broken parts, and supply shortages. All this was very common to real life wagon trains.

* SoundtrackDissonance: As the status of your party got worse and worse, the music would become more and more frantic/depressing, with {{Scare Chord}}s in the soundtrack in poor condition. But strangely, if a sick party member dies and there aren't any more sick people, THE MUSIC RESETS TO THE CHEERFUL SOUNDING MUSIC. Also a form of MoodWhiplash.

** If you ford a river that's too deep, your caulked wagon tips over, or (very rarely) your ferry breaks loose from moorings, some of your party members may drown in the river. Likewise when you raft down the Columbia River, and crash into a rock or (in the Apple II version) the shore.

** And people can almost drown in ''a foot of water'' without the wagon tipping. Were they trying to do handstands in the middle of the bloody river?!?

If you were in the US and went to school from the [[The80s late 1980s]] through the TurnOfTheMillennium, and your classroom or school library was fortunate enough to have a monolithic, clicking heap of machinery called an UsefulNotes/AppleII, chances are you remember a little floppy-disc based game called ''The Oregon Trail''.

If you were in the US and went to school from the late 1980s through the TurnOfTheMillennium, and your classroom or school library was fortunate enough to have a monolithic, clicking heap of machinery called an UsefulNotes/AppleII, chances are you remember a little floppy-disc based game called ''The Oregon Trail''.

If you went to an American school from the late 1980s through the TurnOfTheMillennium, and your classroom or school library was fortunate enough to have a monolithic, clicking heap of machinery called an UsefulNotes/AppleII, chances are you remember a little floppy-disc based game called ''The Oregon Trail''.

* InformedEquipment:
** You can lose your whole clothing inventory and your people still appear fully clothed.
** Similarly, you can lose all your cooking equipment and have no means of starting a fire, but still eat meat (with no horrendous consequences to suggest it's raw).

** Possibly. Ipecac is one of the medicines you can purchase in ''Oregon Trail II''. In its sister game, ''Amazon Trail II'', ipecac is part of a significant plot point. However, ipecac really was a commonly-used medicine on the nineteenth-century American frontier, so this may be a coincidence.

* VendorTrash: In the second game you can buy things like china sets and grandfather clocks that just make wagon tipping more likely and give you something to trade with people.

->''"That's how I learned what it means to be an American. To embrace the pioneer spirit, shoot everything that moves, drown my family in a river, and die of starvation somewhere in the midwest."''
-->--'''1up.com's''' July 4th [[https://web.archive.org/web/20160525014244/http://www.1up.com/features/happy-trails Oregon Trail Retrospective]]

If you went to an American public school from the late 1980s through the TurnOfTheMillennium, and your classroom or school library was fortunate enough to have a monolithic, clicking heap of machinery called an UsefulNotes/AppleII, chances are you remember a little floppy-disc based game called ''The Oregon Trail''.