Dysentery Disappointment

The first time I played The Oregon Trail I was in the 4^th grade, and no one in my class could make it to Oregon, no matter how hard we all tried.  This was back when we had Apple IIs in our schools…the screens were green and black…and The Oregon Trail was the only computer game that we had ever seen…and it was unbeatable.  Back when I started to play games there was no end to them…the levels just increased…like Asteroids and Donkey Kong (mind you Donkey Kong kidnapped Pauline and he was a brown blob on the screen) and Pac Man.  The levels never really ended, they just got harder.  Anyway The Oregon Trail came along and we got to play it in school!  How freakin’ awesome is that?!  So, we would play this game over and over and over again…and NEVER made it to Oregon…we always died along the way or our ox’s ran away when we tried to ford the stupid rivers.  It was the most exciting and frustrating thing I think any of us had experienced to that point in our lives.

I have seen over the years the new editions of the game and have never really been interested in playing them…until recently.  My husband just jailbroke my ipod touch recently and I downloaded it to give it a try…mind you it is only 99 cents if you do buy it.  I played for 3 days…forded several rivers…and floated down others…and made it to Oregon!  We had some broken bones, snake bites, and the wagon broke down a couple of times.  I only lost 1 child…to an eagle swooping down and taking him away.  No one got dysentery…at all…let alone dying of it!  I tried for 3 days and no dysentery…I have great disappointment about this, and I am feeling really robbed right now!  I have tried to understand this for several days now…I have even started the stupid game again…this time determined to die of dysentery.

As I started this game one of the last few times I noticed that this game was created and published by “The Learning Company”, which is why all those wise school administrators allowed us to play a game in school.  We were supposed to be learning from this game…yeah, I had to think about that too.   I asked my husband what he learned from playing The Oregon Trail…he said “I learned that you could die of dysentery.”  I asked my Angie what she learned from playing The Oregon Trail…and she said the same thing that my husband did…only added “whatever that means”.  I don’t know how to break this to the programmers at The Learning Company, but having been a 9 year old playing this game…1:  children have NO idea what dysentery is, let alone that it could kill them.  2:  If geography was your aim…children living in the 1980’s have no idea where “Fort Whatchamacallit” is, and nor do they care.  All this Learning Company really accomplished was irritating kids into being determined to beat a game that was unbeatable. 

 And now we who played this game as a child are downloading this app hoping to see those fateful words again “you have died of dysentery”.  Well right now all I am dying of is disappointment.   I wish we could retain what made the classics the classics…so here’s to Pac Man and Donkey Kong, may we play them forever and smile the whole time!