Viral Vote: Is 'The Oregon Trail' the Best Computer Game Ever?
GamerPaper.com recently posted a comedic article entitled "If Classic Videogames Had Achievements." In it, they showed humorous examples of achievement awards some well-known games could have included.
Most of the article confused me. (Including the title. When did "videogames" become all one word? Did I miss something??) However, I did find the above reference to The Oregon Trail pretty hilarious. "Don't name any of your party members swear words." Ha! I gotta rip that bit off.
Anyway, the article got me thinking about The Oregon Trail. It's truly a classic game. Did you realize that people first rode covered wagons across a computerized western terrain back in 1971? Believe it or not, that's the year The Oregon Trail was developed — a year before the release of Pong!
Even in the Internet age, where crappy browser-based flash games are once again all the rage as if Intellivision never went out of style, The Trail continues to find an audience. Until last year, the game was a popular Facebook application and has even recently been released to cell phones and iPods!
Thinking back to my childhood, some of my fondest memories of elementary school are playing The Oregon Trail. It beat the f*** out of Snooper Troops. (That game totally blew. I always got caught in some guy's basement! And why is an "edutainment" game encouraging kids to break into people's houses anyway?!)
It was also significantly better than using a "turtle" to draw a box. Can someone explain to me why we dedicated class time to this??
And Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I'll tell you where she was: Boringtown!
To conclude, The Oregon Trail is the best computer game ever, right? (And I'm talking "computer games" here. Please don't compare it to your Xboxes and your TurboGrafx-16s.)
