Oregon Trail

Teleprinter Gaming | 1971 | Oregon Trail Computer Game Scan

If you grew up in the United States, you might have fond memories of playing Oregon Trail in school. It was often the only game installed in school computer labs, where a playing session consisted of making tough decisions to survive in a hostile 1840s wilderness, and typically ended with tragic deaths from dysentery. However, unless you went to school in Minnesota in 1970s, you are probably thinking of one of the video-game remakes. Perhaps you played the Apple II remake in 1985, or the mouse-based remakes from the 90s, but not the original game from 1971.

The original Oregon Trail was not technically a "video" game, but rather belonged to a brief era of pre-screen computer gaming. You may have noticed that the picture above is labeled Oregon Trail Game Scan (not Screenshot). It's a scan of the printer paper produced by playing the game. The original game predates "screenshots" since it used no video display.

Bringing Scrolling Back

There's a lot to learn from this brief era of pre-screen gaming. From the perspective of a game designer, the above scan is really fascinating. Not only does it show the user what's happening in the game world, but it also forms a "journal", or "log" of what has happened. This lets players (physically) scroll back the paper to re-read and remember where they were when they are resuming play. That's why it's called scrolling, after all!

Today, video-games typically have this feature as well. Often, it's a journal menu, or a floating event log in the case of an online game. You'll find these in most story-based games of all genres, and in nearly every RPG. If you think about it, sometimes they are the same layout as the Oregon Trail example, a top-down, moment-by-moment record of events.

This similarity is no coincidence. For example, take the series Elder Scrolls and trace back the lineage of it's journal screen, and you'll see that it eventually traces back to text-based RPGs from the 80s, the earliest versions in turn written for teletype computers. The journal pause menu in modern games is the thus just the modern, virtual version of scrolling printer output. Perhaps this screen-less past isn't so distant at all.

Screen-Free, Starting with Gaming

How can we learn lessons from the pre-video era, but with modern genres and expectations? The WhisperBox game console project takes this idea runs with it. Let's explore new interfaces for a screen-free future, starting with electronic gaming and entertainment. It's hard enough keeping your phone off and forming new, better habits, so let's keep it fun!

Let's remake modern video game mechanics, unleashed into new genres of board games played in the physical world. Let's add new dimensions and interactivity to fiction, or any other art.

Footnotes & Further Reading

Want explore more pre-screen computer aesthetics? Try playing the '78 version of OregonTrail in your web-browser: OregonTrail.run, or read through the article on a fan site discussing this and other early versions, including the teletype versions. Similarly, browse through PC Magazine - The Forgotten World of Teletype Computer Games for more classic games like the Oregon trail example, including a scan of the predecessor of all strategy and simulation game, Empire (1971).