History of MECC and Oregon Trail 149
Gammu writes "For the past thirty years, many children have been raised with a heavy diet of MECC games like Oregon Trail, Odell Lake and Lemonade Stand. These products weren't developed by a major game developer. Rather, they were developed by the state of Minnesota for use in their schools. What began as an initiative to get Minnesota students ready for the micro-computer age turned into a multi-million dollar a year business whose products are still used in US schools even a decade after MECC was sold off to another developer."
Opensource Effort (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Censorship of the Oregon Trail (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of the history of conflict between Native Americans and European settlers is swept under the carpet now -- we, as Americans, don't like to admit that we waged a war of genocide. Sure, there were people who actually had respect for Native Americans, and the war was never couched that way, but when push came to shove, Native Americans were exterminated or driven from land that settlers wanted.
Now, as for Oregon Trail, I think it has to do with the changing attitudes about civil rights and respecting other cultures. People became much more aware of the fact that a lot of hatred is learned, and that there is no place for teaching hatred in our schools. Part of the whole anti-discrimination movement of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I think.
Re:Not a single bison shall stand (Score:4, Interesting)
And no, he wasn't being sarcastic or anything, he really seemed to have an emotional attachment to electronic buffalo, and punished students who slaughtered them.
Idea stolen from Trail West? (Score:4, Interesting)
A couple years ago I got an email from a person trying to get the PET game Trail West to run for his dad (who wrote Trail West) on an emulator and in part of the reply was this message:
If you want to see what Trail West was like, the file is located in this disk image [portcommodore.com], and is playable on the VICE Emulator [viceteam.org]. After LOADing but before RUNing, you need to POKE 639,94 in order to circumvent the ancient copy protection. (my bad, should have fixed it)
MECC was for ME! (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that I haven't heard mentioned yet, though, is Freedom. I remember this game very well. In it, you played a slave in the south, and the game began with your escape. The game randomly generated a character with different starting statistics each time. Sometimes you would be able to read, sometimes not - in which case all signs appeared as gibberish. Sometimes your character would have a compass or tools, other times you would have to rely on the sun or the growth of moss on trees. The game was presented from a first-person perspective in static screens. The goal, of course, was to make it to the Free North. Over the course of the game, the player met sympathetic people who sheltered them, members of the Underground Railroad, and of course, many people trying to catch and return the escaped slave. It was a very deep and engaging game. The Oregon Trail and Odell Lake were educational, but even on an Apple IIGS Freedom was scary and immersive - I really was afraid when I heard that distorted bark and knew I had dogs on my trail (and no cayenne pepper to throw them off!) Of course now I would probably laugh at the simple graphics and sound, but at the time the game was incredible.
Re:Fond memories (Score:3, Interesting)
It's amazing to me that I still can't describe just how much fun it was to play a multi-player shoot'em'up with nothing but quickly printed tables of polar coordinates and vectors. How the advent of 300 baud modems made some people kings over a world of 110 baud modems. How to tweak the output to minimize response time, and interrupting it as soon as you could to get another shot off. How alliances were forged and broken, and "kill stealing" was both commonplace and frowned upon. Accusations of people writing cheat software on their Apple ][s. And blasting the Gorns, of course!
It's a shame that even if there was a duplicate of the software available today, it probably wouldn't be enjoyable anymore. It was a different era of computing.
Re:The Censorship of the Oregon Trail (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife worked there (Score:4, Interesting)
Little known fact about OT: if you started on the exact day, followed the exact path and stayed on a specific schedule (resting, waiting, etc) when you got to the Donner Pass you'd die in a snowstorm just like they did. The people working on the project (and all of the historical ones really) were adamant that historical details be correct, so someone embedded this and it stayed though many versions. (I do not recall the details, but I'm sure there are people out there who could produce the specifics.)
Cris E
St Paul, MN
Re:The Censorship of the Oregon Trail (Score:1, Interesting)
I hate to throw some cold water on all the other posters' knee-jerk rants about the PC police and how it ain't acceptable to portray killin' dirty injuns no more, but in a word, no. The "Indians are attacking the wagon train! Circle up the wagons!" thing is completely fictional, a product of the dime novels. There is not one historical account of any Indian tribes attacking a wagon train.
And why would they? Those guys were just passing through, after all. The tribes usually had a much bigger problem with the people who decided to stick around than they did with people who were headed off to Oregon to be somebody else's problem. Why rush out there and attack the wagons and get shot at, when they'll be long gone tomorrow anyway?
In other words, Natives are not stupid.
Apple/MECC history (Score:3, Interesting)
In attendance at this conference were some representatives from MECC, who were busy gathering information that would be used by the school districts in Minnesota. By Minnesota state law at the time, no school district could purchase computer equipment unless it had been explicitly authorized by MECC.
Notable enough was that Steve Jobs had impressed the MECC staff sufficiently that they returned home to Minneapolis and changed the computer purchasing orders for the entire state of Minnesota to include the Apple II and Commodore PET as "authorized" purchases... with a strong recommendation to purchase the Apple computers. All told, several hundred Apple computers were purchased by the Minnesota school districts at a very critical time in the history of Apple Computer, and Minnesota began their movement from their central timeshare system to having nearly everything on PCs (and the demise of the MECC timeshare computer).
My own experience more directly in this incident was at Austin High School (Austin, MN) where the high school had a fairly well established Computer Science program (quite popular among the students), and the primary computer system in use for instruction simply crashed cold and hard with no way to repair it. BTW, that was a Wang minicomputer with a whole 32K of RAM shared between 4 terminals. Faced with the possibility of having to cancel the class and re-arrange the schedules of nearly 300 students, the Austin School District decided to check with MECC and see what was available for a replacement. Fresh from the trip to Utah, MECC recommended that they check out the Apple computers from Cupertino, and immediately ordered the computers. BTW, the serial numbers on those computers had only 3 digits when they arrived. I didn't even notice that until 4 years later right before I graduated from H.S., and well after Apple computer was well established and acknowledged as an industry leader.