50 years of The Oregon Trail: The hidden controversies of a video game that defined the US

50 years of The Oregon Trail: The hidden controversies of a video game that defined the US Courtesy of HarperCollins Productions The Oregon Trail was once the most widely distributed software in US schools. Courtesy of HarperCollins Productions Developers worked to emphasise the stories of the Native American experience in later versions of the game, but criticisms persist "The underlying concept of The Oregon Trail – surviving a 2,000-mile journey across difficult terrain to a promised land – is perfectly suited to development as a game," Bouchard says. Olsson, author of a book on the game called Red Dead's History, often calls Red Dead Redemption II "this generation's Oregon Trail". No one told us that people in The Oregon Trail were charting lands that had been charted by others first – Alan Henry "When we were kids, these games were presented as 'history', and no one bothered to tell us that people in The Oregon Trail were charting lands that had been charted by others first," says Alan Henry, managing editor of PC Magazine and a journalist who's spent years covering video games. "The original game focused too heavily on one perspective only, the white Americans who were travelling west, looking for a new life in a new land," says Caroline Fraser, head of HarperCollins Productions, which now runs The Oregon Trail franchise.