Developer and reverse engineer, Scott Percival, took a long look at a bug in the Oregon Trail game's river crossings.
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions selling 65 million copies. What you probably don't know is the game's great untold secret.
Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to "wait to see if conditions improve"; waiting a day will consume food but not recalculate any health conditions, granting your party immortality.
Whether the game depicts an adventure or an invasion depends on perspective. The original Oregon Trail video game from the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) for the Apple II series took on a life of its own and grew and changed over several decades.
Previously:
(2024) Apple is Turning The Oregon Trail into a Movie
(2016) "You have died of dysentery" -- The Oregon Trail in Computer Class
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Smithsonian covers the legendary Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and it's killer game "The Oregon Trail."
Never heard of MECC? It went hand in hand with Apple Computer Inc. in its earliest days. Steve Jobs said as much in a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution: "One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's." Apple II's loaded with MECC games.
Minnesota was a Midwestern Silicon Valley by the early 1970s. The State of Minnesota threw huge funds to entice computer programmers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul when it created MECC in 1973. From 1978 to 1999, MECC, together with Apple, competed against private software companies to turn American children into a nation of computer-savvy early adopters and make computer class as much a part of American schooling as math and English.
"MECC's goal was on putting a computer in the hands of every K-12 student in Minnesota," says Dale LaFrenz, MECC co-founder and CEO from 1985 to 1996. "We already had all schools in Minnesota running teletypewriters hooked to a huge UNIVAC [mainframe]." The UNIVAC was installed in a climate-controlled room at MECC headquarters. Up to 435 users across Minnesota could access it at one time from anywhere that had a telephone line.
Once MECC had this system, it needed a game.
[...] When MECC hired Rawitsch [Don Rawitsch, one of the authors/programmers of the game] in 1974, the game had been a dormant pile of papers for three years. MECC set him to work resurrecting the game, and as he did, he added new features. He read diaries of Oregon Trail pioneers for ideas on new events to include, such as pegging the likelihood of certain events to certain locations.
[...] "MECC went to Apple very early on and cut a deal for five Apple II's," says LaFrenz. "We launched The Oregon Trail for proof of concept, tested with Minnesota schools and had a positive evaluation." From there, MECC put out a solicitation for a hardware company to supply the computers. A dozen or so manufacturers answered, among them Radio Shack, IBM, Atari, Commodore and Apple. Apple was an industry lightweight, but Steve Jobs had parallel ideas about computer education.
"[The partnership] worked," LaFrenz says. "MECC became Apple's largest dealer and sold to all the Minnesota schools. MECC and Apple were always in sync, including a grand plan to 'save the world by putting computing power in the hands of every kid in America.' Humility did not run in the veins of Steve [Wozniak] and Steve [Jobs]."
From the Hollywood Reporter: Apple is turning the classic computer game Oregon Trail into a big budget action-comedy movie.
Grab your wagons and oxen, and get ready to ford a river: A movie adaptation of the popular grade school computer game Oregon Trail is in development at Apple.
The studio landed the film pitch, still in early development, that has Will Speck and Josh Gordon attached to direct and produce. EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will provide original music and produce via their Ampersand production banner. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie.
Sounds like a good day to die of dysentery.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Thursday January 16, @08:53AM (2 children)
And, yet again, "all you have to do" is drastically hack the executable code to ignore half a dozen serious barriers to doing this because on the actual game it's impossible to do.
It's like the things about Donkey Kong and Pacman and various legacy games where you get an article crowing about how it's been beaten and it's not possible to pass level X and actually all that's happened is someone has patched the original code for the bugs, limits, etc. that prevented it.
Basically, to save yourself a read, the guy had to hack the date handling, the food consumption, the health limits and then use a tiny bug and wait 14,000 in-game years to actually get to the end. Literal BASIC POKE's and actually changing the code to make it happen.
Don't push such things as "old game finally beaten by exploiting bug that was there all along" when it's actually "someone reverse-engineered part of the game that was the obstacle to this ever working, patched around it in many places, and it's simply not possible on the stock game because you just die, but only on their patched versions".
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Thursday January 16, @10:21AM
Take TFA as being more about the reverse engineering required for that, albeit with a slightly misleading headline on Soylent, and it's a much more enjoyable deep dive into hacking from first principles (Scott knew next to nothing about the Apple II going in), and especially so since you don't even have to risk dying of dysentery on the way.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @12:44AM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 16, @03:54PM
Since the game was written in BASIC, with a real Apple II, Mr. Reverse Engineer could have saved himself considerable effort with all the watches and stepping through the ROM. There are often copy protection measures to prevent players from hacking the BASIC by disabling the various ways such as ctrl-c to break out of the program. However there is a very easy way to generate an interrupt on a real Apple II that can't be stopped: touch a 130 ohm resistor to 2 pins of one of the unused expansion slots (pins 27 and 30, IIRC). This will break out of a BASIC program, leaving the user at the command line, where one can LIST the entire program, modify it, and anything else possible. Ages ago, I used this technique on Phantasie, another game written in BASIC. I suppose MAME does not have any support for that one, though it should be real simple to implement.
The limited capacity of early computers as well as limited time and game design principles pushed designers to leave lots of things out. Adventure games tended to simplify by not having seasons, weather, or nighttime. No aging either, so that even if the game tracked time in some fashion, it is perfectly possible to wait thousands of years and not die of old age. Food was one of the few things you did need to handle. Ultima II was super hardcore about food. Run out of food, and you die instantly.
Often, code was written in great haste, sloppily, with bad algorithms and bugs. There was this very simple galactic conquest game (called simply Galaxy), written in BASIC that took 30 seconds to generate a random star map. I hacked into that, saw the lameness of the generation algorithm, and wrote a faster one that took 1 second. Another game written in BASIC is Dark Forest (which is an implementation of Wizard's Quest, an Avalon Hill board game), and that has a bug in the calculation of how many reinforcements a player gets. I fixed that. Many aftermarket DOSes fixed a simple flaw in Apple DOS that made disk access far slower than it could have been. My favorite of these was Beagle Brother's Pronto DOS, as they had also streamlined the code so it took 2 fewer sectors of disk space.
Early simulations and games left an awful lot out. No seasons, weather, or nighttime. A criticism I have of many modern MMORPGs is that apart from trees, vegetation is not an obstacle. It was not easy to blaze a trail through 10 foot tall grass, cross timbers, peat bogs (muskeg), etc. The first group to try cutting through wilderness to make a new trail for wagons was in for a lot of work. These MMORPGS, you may as well be jogging around in a park with neatly mowed grass.
(Score: 2) by progo on Friday January 17, @02:22AM
Whether you're familiar with Oregon Trail or not, check out Gaming Historian's excellent 2024 film that tells the history of the game [youtube.com].
(Score: 1) by dbitter1 on Saturday January 18, @05:16PM (1 child)
I was a wee lad when this game came out, before I could really hack anything... I remember our teacher having this belief that if you tried copying OT (or most MECC disks) it had a "self destructing copy protection" that would brick the disk. Can anyone actually confirm or deny that existed?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, @03:01PM
In elementary school we were told that the fire alarm pull handles would also squirt out blue ink so that if they were pulled as a prank, they'd know who did it. We were never sure if that was true or not. :)