On December 3, 1971, a Minneapolis eighth-grade history class crowded around a single teletype machine that had spent most of its life stored in the school’s janitorial closet. There was no screen, no color, no soundtrack — just a paper printer clacking out survival odds one line at a time, connected by phone line to a mainframe downtown. The game was called simply “Oregon,” built in a few weeks by three student teachers with zero budget. Kids started showing up before 7 a.m. just to get a turn. Fifty-five years later, it’s one of the most-played educational programs ever made.

A Board Game Turned Into Code

Don Rawitsch was looking for a better way to teach westward migration than the board game his student-teaching program was using that semester. His roommates, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger — both math teachers who also happened to know how to program — suggested turning the unit into a computer simulation instead, according to Slate’s interview with Rawitsch. The three of them wrote it on a teletype terminal, the only computing hardware available to Minnesota schools at the time. Students worked in groups of five, typing commands like “BANG” to hunt for food while the machine printed the results on paper, one clattering line at a time.

Shut Down, Then Nearly Lost

When the class ended that December, the three creators shut the program down and kept only a paper printout of the code. Rawitsch didn’t touch it again for almost three years. He picked it back up in October 1974 after taking a job with the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, known as MECC, where — with permission from his old roommates — he spent a single Thanksgiving weekend retyping the entire program from that printout into MECC’s system, according to MNopedia, the Minnesota Historical Society’s own encyclopedia. It went live for Minnesota classrooms in 1975, with Rawitsch cross-checking pioneer diaries to tighten up the historical accuracy along the way.

An Apple Bid Changed Everything

The game might have stayed a regional curiosity if not for a 1978 hardware decision. MECC accepted a bid from a small startup run by two guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to supply Apple II computers to Minnesota schools, and Oregon Trail got retooled to run on them as part of the standard software package. From there it spread fast: per MNopedia, by 1989 roughly one in three school districts in the entire country had a copy running somewhere in its building. A generation of American kids met dysentery, snapped wagon axles, and fatal river fordings on the exact same green-and-black screen.

The Creators Made Nothing From It

None of the three original programmers ever collected royalties. Rawitsch has said plainly that he never expected to: “when you’re an educator, you’re encouraged to write and publish,” he told Slate, and in 1978 he did exactly that, printing the full source code in the hobbyist magazine Creative Computing for anyone to copy. It wasn’t until Oregon Trail II shipped in 1995 that MECC publicly credited the three of them by name for the first time — nearly a quarter-century after that first cold December afternoon in the classroom.

Where It Ended Up

MECC itself didn’t survive the software industry’s consolidation. The state sold it off to venture capitalists in 1991, and it was folded into SoftKey by 1999, per MNopedia’s timeline. The game outlasted the company that packaged it: it got an iPhone port in 2008 and a spot in the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016. None of that was the plan. The plan was a homework assignment on a borrowed phone line, built by people who never charged for it and never expected anyone to remember their names.

Somewhere along the way, the game’s grimmest feature turned into its most durable joke. Every wagon party eventually lost someone to a snakebite, a broken leg, or — most famously — dysentery, and the blunt on-screen death notices became the thing an entire generation actually remembers. That gallows humor wasn’t a marketing decision; it came straight out of the pioneer diaries Rawitsch consulted while writing the original text. Decades before anyone talked about “gamifying” a lesson plan, three unpaid student teachers had already figured out that kids pay closer attention to a story when the stakes feel real, even inside a classroom assignment run off a borrowed phone line.

What actually lasts in classroom software, it turns out, was never the budget or the branding — it was three people solving a specific, small problem for the kids sitting in front of them, and giving the fix away.