Hollywood’s mad rush to adapt video games into mostly unsuccessful movies continues unabated. It’s only a matter of time until someone gets around to Oregon Trail, isn’t it? If you’re in your late twenties or early thirties, Oregon Trail almost certainly occupied a great deal of your time, whether you liked it or not. Billed as an educational video game, it was the default piece of software shipped with all the Apple IIe computers being installed in the computer labs of our nation’s schools in the late 80s. Power up one of those creaking, computing, behemoths and you really only had two choices: Use the word processor or play Oregon Trail. You probably went with The Oregon Trail on your grimy, monochrome monitor.
In theory it was an educational game (which is I suppose why teachers embraced it), unfortunately Oregon Trail never really taught you anything, other than that you should probably forget about carrying supplies and just bring a lot of bullets. The game sent students on a journey across the wilds of America as a group of settlers traveling the Oregon trail. Your goal was to make it all the way to the new settlement, but more often than not all your settlers ended up dead by the side of the road, usually from dysentery. I played it mostly so I could kill off my settlers and then write amusing or mildly offensive messages on their tombstones, hopefully to be discovered by whoever played the game on my station during the next computer lab period. This aspect of the game is, however, strangely absent in the first ever Oregon Trail movie trailer.
While they’ve left out all the witty tombstones they have managed to capture everything else about the game that made it so, well, ubiquitous across the middle school landscape. If someone were dumb enough to turn The Oregon Trail into a movie, here’s what it would have to look like:
