Watch This Short Video on the Forgotten History of ‘The Oregon Trail’

As you might recall from a recent Motherboard article, the history of The Oregon Trail is pretty wild. In 1971, a trio of public school teachers in rural Minnesota created a teleprinter game as a teaching aid. From there, it got transferred into a statewide mainframe and, eventually, sold for profit. Yet the three people who created it weren't credited for decades, and still haven't seen a cent of the revenue.

The below video, from YouTuber Hodges Usry, is a quick-and-dirty look at how this happened, assembled from recent talks by the developers as well as archival materials. Usry told Motherboard he took inspiration from our in-depth interview with designers Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger when putting his video together.

You should watch it, and of course read the article, if you haven't already! They make a fine pair. The story behind The Oregon Trail is rich enough for a feature film: unfettered creativity butting up against the all-consuming profit motive sounds ripe for The Social Network treatment.

For his part, Usry concurs with something Rawitsch says in the video: that the The Oregon Trail endures because it wasn't conceived for profit. We don't disagree, necessarily, but it is nice to be paid.

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Footage of ‘Die Hard 64’ Has Surfaced, and It Doesn't Look Great

Like the cavernous warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, video game history is littered with forgotten relics. Akira for the Super Nintendo; Resident Evil 1.5 for the PlayStation; the recently departed Silent Hills. Intrepid, tech-savvy fans have resurrected a number of these abandoned projects, although the potential conjured by the words "SNES Akira game" tends to fall well short of the reality.

This is the case with Die Hard 64, an unreleased Nintendo 64 game that appears to be a preliminary version of the GameCube's Die Hard Vendetta (2002). Developer Bits Studios was split into two teams, according to a Retro Collect interview with former Bits employee and current Assembler Games forumer 10ahu. One of those teams was developing Die Hard 64.

The footage above comes from 10ahu's ROMs, which, before you ask, aren't public. It's a little unfair to judge an incomplete game like this (though the eventual Die Hard Vendetta is no classic either), but hell: it sure looks rough! Skip to 2:20 for an amazingly fiddly gunfight that makes Goldeneye 007 look like Counter-Strike.

Playing Die Hard 64 would likely be a nightmare. It's best like this, as an idealized dream; we can look at these messy prototypes and wonder at what might have been, given a little more time, a little more money. As Stephen King cautions in Pet Sematary, "Sometimes dead is better."

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