Oregon Trail Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
63 free Oregon Trail trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Oregon Trail trivia quiz covers both things people mean by the name: the real 2,170-mile wagon route that carried around 400,000 emigrants from the Missouri River to the Pacific Northwest, and the classroom computer game that taught a couple of generations to fear dysentery. Expect questions on Independence, Missouri, Fort Kearny and Fort Laramie, Chimney Rock and Independence Rock, South Pass, the Barlow Road, oxen versus mules, and the diseases and accidents that actually killed people on the trail. The game half runs from the 1971 teleprinter original written by three Carleton College student teachers, through the 1985 Apple II classic (Matt's General Store, caulking the wagon, the hunting minigame) to the sequels, parodies and the 2021 remake. Roughly a third of the questions are easy for anyone who played the game in school, a third are medium, and the rest will test people who have read the trail diaries. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 63 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Student teachers from which Minnesota school wrote the original Oregon Trail?
Carleton
Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger were Carleton College seniors doing student teaching in Minneapolis; they coded the game in about two weeks for Rawitsch's history class.
Q 02In what year did the very first version of The Oregon Trail debut in a Minneapolis junior-high classroom?
1971
The Oregon Trail was first played on 3 December 1971 on the Minneapolis school district's HP 2100 minicomputer, reached through a teleprinter with no graphics at all.
Q 03In the original teleprinter version, what word did players have to type to fire their gun while hunting?
BANG
Later versions randomised the word between BANG and POW, and typing it faster earned more food; a misspelling meant the shot did nothing.
Q 04Which Minnesota organisation produced and distributed The Oregon Trail from 1975?
MECC
MECC, the state-funded Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, put the game on its timesharing network in 1975, giving it to Minnesota schools free and selling it elsewhere.
Q 05In the 1985 game, the wagon party sets out from which town on the Missouri River?
Independence
The 1985 game starts every party at Independence, Missouri, the classic jumping-off point, in the spring of 1848.
Q 06Where does the journey end in the 1985 game?
Willamette Valley
The goal is the Willamette Valley, the fertile farmland west of the Cascades that drew most Oregon emigrants; reaching it after the final river ends the game.
Q 07Which of these is one of the three professions a player can choose at the start of the 1985 game?
Carpenter
Banker, carpenter and farmer doubled as difficulty levels, each starting with a different amount of cash.
Q 08Where does the 1985 game have you buy food, clothing and ammunition before leaving?
Matt's General Store
Matt's General Store at the start of the 1985 game sells the supplies; the same goods cost more at the forts along the trail, so stocking up before leaving pays off.
Q 09Which of these is one of the ways to cross a river in the 1985 game?
Caulk the wagon and float it across
Players could ford the river, caulk the wagon and float it across, or at some crossings pay for a ferry; the odds depended on the river's depth and the weather.
Q 10On the last leg of The Oregon Trail (1985), players can pay a toll or raft down which river?
Columbia
At The Dalles the player chooses between rafting down the Columbia River, dodging rocks in a simple action minigame, or paying to take the Barlow Toll Road around it.
Q 11What is the maximum food weight you can carry back to the wagon in Oregon Trail's 1985 hunting minigame?
100 pounds
However much you shoot, the 1985 game lets you carry only 100 pounds of meat back to the wagon, a nod to how much a real hunter could haul before it spoiled.
Q 12Who was the lead designer of the 1985 graphical remake of The Oregon Trail?
R. Philip Bouchard
R. Philip Bouchard led the 1985 graphical redesign, adding the real-time hunting and river-crossing scenes and insisting the fun come from an immersive, accurate journey rather than lectures.
Q 13Which grim message from the game became a popular T-shirt slogan?
You have died of dysentery
Q 21In the 1985 hunting minigame, how did the game show that an animal had been shot?
It flipped upside down
Hit an animal and it flipped upside down; Bouchard's team used that as a placeholder until proper death graphics were ready, but playtesting children loved it, so it stayed.
Q 22StarKid Productions turned the game into a parody stage musical in 2014. What was it called?
The Trail to Oregon!
It premiered in Chicago and was later posted in full on YouTube, like StarKid's earlier hit A Very Potter Musical.
Q 23The famous 1985 graphical version of The Oregon Trail was first released for which computer?
Apple II
'You have died of dysentery' became the game's most quoted line and a T-shirt staple; the 1985 version introduced several distinct illnesses, dysentery among them, in place of generic sickness.
Q 14In which year was The Oregon Trail inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame?
2016
The Strong museum inducted The Oregon Trail into its World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016, alongside Space Invaders, Sonic the Hedgehog and The Sims.
Q 15Across all its versions, roughly how many copies of The Oregon Trail had been sold by 2011?
65 million
By 2011 the series had sold about 65 million copies across its versions, helped by years of bundling with school computers so children played it without anyone buying it.
Q 16Which company bought The Oregon Trail's original publisher and released the next games in the series?
SoftKey
SoftKey International bought the publisher a year after it went public and folded it into what became The Learning Company; the Minnesota studio was closed in 1999.
Q 17Which educational game joined The Oregon Trail in The Strong museum's hall of fame in 2021?
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, Brøderbund's 1985 geography game, entered the hall of fame in 2021 alongside Animal Crossing, Microsoft Flight Simulator and StarCraft.
Q 18Which of these was a real MECC spin-off game in the same series?
The Amazon Trail
The Amazon Trail, released in 1993, sent players up the river by canoe; The Yukon Trail, Africa Trail and MayaQuest: The Mystery Trail rounded out the family.
Q 19What is the name of the 2012 parody game that swapped the pioneers for survivors of a zombie apocalypse?
Organ Trail
Organ Trail, from the studio The Men Who Wear Many Hats, began as a 2010 browser game and reached iOS and Android as Organ Trail: Director's Cut in 2012.
Q 20The 2021 remake of The Oregon Trail, developed by Gameloft, launched first on which subscription service?
Apple Arcade
Gameloft's remake debuted on Apple Arcade in April 2021 before coming to PC, Switch and other platforms; the studio consulted Native American historians to rework how tribes are portrayed.
The 1985 version was written for the Apple II, the computer most American schools owned; MS-DOS, Mac and Windows ports followed between 1990 and 1993.
Q 24In which programming language was the original version written?
BASIC
The original was about 800 lines of BASIC on the Minneapolis schools' timesharing system; Rawitsch printed it out before it was deleted and retyped it in 1974.
Q 25Don Rawitsch published the game's full source code in the May–June 1978 issue of which magazine?
Creative Computing
He included some of the historical data he had used to tune the odds of disasters along the trail.
Q 26In what year was Oregon Trail II released?
1995
Oregon Trail II came out in 1995 on CD-ROM, adding a choice of jumping-off towns, departure years from 1840 to 1860 and routes to California and Utah.
Q 27When MECC went public in 1994, The Oregon Trail made up roughly what share of annual revenue?
One third
Nine years after release it was still the company's flagship product.
Q 28Roughly how long was the historic Oregon Trail from the Missouri River to Oregon?
2,170 miles
The Oregon Trail ran about 2,170 miles from the Missouri River to western Oregon, its eastern half on the plains and its western half through the mountains and the Snake River country.
Q 29Which shallow, muddy river did the trail follow across the plains, 'too thin to plow and too thick to drink'?
Platte
The Platte, 'a mile wide and an inch deep' in another saying, was useless for boats, but its flat valley gave wagons a natural road west with grass, water and buffalo.
Q 30Which army post, established in 1848, was the first place on the Oregon Trail to buy supplies or mail a letter?
Fort Kearny
Fort Kearny, built by the army in 1848 where the feeder routes from Missouri and Iowa converged, offered emigrants their first store, blacksmith and post office on the trail.