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Why was The Oregon Trail never copied?
Or if it was copied, why weren't the copies successful?
For those of you who aren't familiar, The Oregon Trail was an old Apple game where you took control of a party of settlers headed along the namesake trail, trying to reach the Willamette Valley with as many of your original party (and as much of their stuff) as possible. Essentially the whole game was an exercise in weighing of risks and costs--do I pay the Indians to help me across this river, or try to float the wagon and maybe lose more than I would have paid? Do I want this other stuff enough to trade this supply for it? Can I make do with this much, or will I have to just buy more further along the trail at an inflated price? The whole thing was livened up by occasional minigames, like hunting for food or rafting down a river.
The game was very simple in terms of programming, with little animation and no AI beyond the aimless wandering of hunted animals in front of your sights. It was essentially a big database of variables to manage. And it was FUN. But aside from one sequel--and a rather daft "Amazon Trail" knockoff where you're boating around in the jungle catching fish, like that's supposed to be fun--the general framework was never copied. There were other games incorporating logistics, to be sure, but no more expedition games of that type that I can recall. And the general scheme could easily be copied to any milieu you like, from history to fantasy to sci-fi, with any number of tweaks. But that never happened. Why, do you think?
For those of you who aren't familiar, The Oregon Trail was an old Apple game where you took control of a party of settlers headed along the namesake trail, trying to reach the Willamette Valley with as many of your original party (and as much of their stuff) as possible. Essentially the whole game was an exercise in weighing of risks and costs--do I pay the Indians to help me across this river, or try to float the wagon and maybe lose more than I would have paid? Do I want this other stuff enough to trade this supply for it? Can I make do with this much, or will I have to just buy more further along the trail at an inflated price? The whole thing was livened up by occasional minigames, like hunting for food or rafting down a river.
The game was very simple in terms of programming, with little animation and no AI beyond the aimless wandering of hunted animals in front of your sights. It was essentially a big database of variables to manage. And it was FUN. But aside from one sequel--and a rather daft "Amazon Trail" knockoff where you're boating around in the jungle catching fish, like that's supposed to be fun--the general framework was never copied. There were other games incorporating logistics, to be sure, but no more expedition games of that type that I can recall. And the general scheme could easily be copied to any milieu you like, from history to fantasy to sci-fi, with any number of tweaks. But that never happened. Why, do you think?
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