The Oregon Trail: The Game and the Real Trail

The game starts in Independence, Missouri, in 1848. You choose a profession — banker, carpenter or farmer, which sets your starting money and the difficulty — name your four companions, pick a month to leave and spend your savings at Matt's General Store on oxen, food, clothing, ammunition and spare wagon parts. The store is invented, but Independence really was a jumping-off point: the first emigrant wagon train was organised here in 1836, and for years afterwards wagon parties gathered here to buy supplies before setting out.

Location precision: Matt's General Store is fictional; the pin marks the town of Independence.

Visitor guidance: The National Frontier Trails Museum in Independence covers the Oregon, California and Santa Fe trails.

The game's designer, R. Philip Bouchard, gave the 1985 version four river crossings, chosen from the many the emigrants faced: the Kansas, the Big Blue, the Green and the Snake. At each you decide whether to ford, caulk the wagon and float it across, or pay for a ferry, and the odds depend on the river's depth after recent rain — just as they did for real overlanders. The trail crossed the Big Blue in north-east Kansas near today's Marysville, also a stop on the Pony Express.

Location precision: The crossing points shifted with the river; the pin marks Marysville, on the Big Blue.

On the North Platte in western Nebraska, a spire of rock rises more than 300 feet above the valley floor: Chimney Rock, one of the best-known landmarks of the whole trail, which emigrants could see from far off as they approached along the river. In the game it is one of the landmarks where you can stop, look around, trade and talk to other travellers; the designer's own screenshot shows a party arriving on 28 April 1848. The rock is now a National Historic Site.

Visitor guidance: A visitor centre near Bayard, Nebraska, looks out on the rock.

Beside the Sweetwater River in central Wyoming lies a great dome of granite. Fur trappers named it Independence Rock after camping here on 4 July 1824 and caching their furs under it. For the emigrants who followed it was one of the great milestones of the journey. Beyond it the trail climbed gently to South Pass, the wide and easy crossing of the Continental Divide that made a wagon road to Oregon possible.

Visitor guidance: Independence Rock State Historic Site has a rest area on Wyoming Highway 220.

West of South Pass, the game asks you to choose: head for the Green River crossing, or take the longer road by Fort Bridger to rest and buy supplies. The fort was real, a trading post set up in 1842 by the mountain man Jim Bridger and his partner Louis Vasquez on Blacks Fork of the Green River, in what was still Mexican territory. "I have established a small fort ... in the road of emigrants," Bridger wrote in 1843. Its site is now a Wyoming state historic site.

The Snake was one of the most feared crossings on the trail, and in the game, as in history, you can pay Shoshone guides to take your wagon across — Bouchard included them because the Shoshone gave emigrants real help here, above all with getting their livestock over safely. The main ford used a chain of islands in the river at what is now Glenns Ferry, Idaho, which is why it became known as Three Island Crossing.

Visitor guidance: Three Island Crossing State Park in Glenns Ferry interprets the ford and has a campground.

At The Dalles, on the Columbia, the wagon road ran out. The game offers the same choice the emigrants faced: float down the Columbia River on a raft — a minigame of dodging rocks that sank countless classroom expeditions — or pay to take the Barlow Road around the south side of Mount Hood. That toll road was built in 1846 by Sam Barlow and Philip Foster and became the last overland stretch of the trail, letting wagons cross the Cascades into the Willamette Valley for the first time.

Location precision: The pin marks the town of The Dalles, where the river and road routes divided.

If you make it, the game tallies your score and may put your name in the Oregon Top Ten. For real emigrants the goal was land in the Willamette Valley, and Oregon City, at the falls of the Willamette, is remembered as the end of the trail, some 2,170 miles from the Missouri. The game, in all its versions, was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016, and "You have died of dysentery" has long outlived the Apple II.

Visitor guidance: The End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center is in Oregon City.