Oregon Trail Game Online

Hitch up your oxen, find some water barrels and get ready for some westward expansion because Oregon Trail is now available to play online — for free.

For small DOS games like The Oregon Trail, you can play online immediately with your browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer.). This feature is still experimental, the game may not work properly. Warning: game save should work, but you should try it early! Also, be careful to select the right game executable in the list below. The game that would be later named The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on December 3, 1971. Although the minicomputer's teletype and paper tape terminals that predate display screens were awkward to children, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to users of the minicomputer time-sharing network owned by Minneapolis Public Schools.

The Internet Archive, which is best known for running the world wide web’s time capsule, The Wayback Machine, has put the game that traumatized countless children of the ’80s and ’90s online. That means future generations can feel the oppressive horror of attempting to fight their way across the Oregon Trail on a steady diet of squirrel meat with only an axe, some rope and frequent bouts of dysentery, pausing in their manifest destiny only long enough to etch grandma’s epitaph on a makeshift tombstone on the side of the trail. Fun, right?

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Of course, Oregon Trail isn’t the only game available. There’s also Duke Nukem, Street Fighter, Burger Blaster, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Lion King and Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer and more than 2,393 other MS-DOS based game titles ready to play in an immersive and engaging lesson in interactive internet preservation.

The online arcade is a “software crate-digger’s dream: Tens of thousands of playable software titles from multiple computer platforms, allowing instant access to decades of computer history in your browser,” the archive wrote. And they definitely want people to play the games, but be prepared to offer feedback. According to a post announcing the new resource, the site’s software curator Jason Scott wants people to reach out and report bugs as they play. “Some of [the games] will still fall over and die, and many of them might be weird to play in a browser window, and of course you can’t really save things off for later, and that will limit things too. But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly,” Scott wrote.

So start playing, but prepare for dysentery.

[Via The Washington Post]

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The goal of the game is to make it across the Oregon Trail with limited resources, fighting the elements without losing your family. Hunt for food, trade with other travelers, fight disease and discover new places. All while learning about the history of the Oregon Trail.

Hunting

An important aspect of the game was the ability to hunt. Using guns and bullets bought over the course of play, players select the hunt option and hunt wild animals to add to their food reserves. Bison are the slowest moving targets and yielded the most food, while rabbits and squirrels were fast and offered very small amounts of food. Deer (eastern section) and elk (western section) are in the middle in terms of speed, size, and food yield; bears are between bison and deer in all three properties. While the amount of wild game shot during a hunting excursion is limited only by the player's supply of bullets, the maximum amount that can be carried back to the wagon is 200 pounds in early versions of the game.

Death

Throughout the course of the game, members of the player's party can fall ill and die from various causes, such as measles, snakebite, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and exhaustion. People can also die from drowning or a broken leg. The player's oxen are also subject to illness and death. People from your party can die, so be sure to monitor the health of your party. Keep them well fed, choose a proper pace, and rest when needed.

Scoring

At the conclusion of the journey, a player's score is determined in two stages. In the first stage, the program awards a 'raw' or unscaled number of points for each remaining family member (weighted by party health), each remaining possession (weighted by type), and remaining cash on hand (one point per dollar). In the second stage, the program multiplies this raw score by a 'degree of difficulty' scalar corresponding to the party's initial level of resources (determined in-game by the profession of the party's leader); for example, a banker starting with $1600.00 receives no bonus, the final score of a carpenter starting with $800.00 is doubled, and the final score of a farmer starting with $400.00 is tripled.

Note: This game is for DOS and to play it on computers with newer versions of Windows you will need a DOS 'emulator' like D-Fend Reloaded.

Installation:

Oregon Trail Game Online Emulator

1. Download and install D-Fend Reloaded.
2. Click on the Download Now button above.
3. Extract the zip file contents to a folder and remember the path.
4. Open D-Fend Reloaded, go to File->Import->Import Folder and choose the folder where you extracted the game.
5. Still in D-Fend Reloaded choose the game you want to play and press 'Run'.

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