21 Ways The Oregon Trail Traumatized You As A Child

“Everyone in your party has died.”

1. The cold-blooded game begins by asking you to name every member of your doomed party, creating an emotional connection to each character.

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2. Then you are smacked with a brutal lesson about class and value in society.

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3. The entire game promotes over-the-top stereotypes.

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4. People can mercilessly steal everything you have at any time.

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“Good lord, I’m doomed.”

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5. The only fun part of the game is gleefully participating in the extinction of the buffalo.

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6. And you always shot exactly 2,000 more pounds of meat than you could carry.

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7. Other emigrants will try to buy an action movie’s worth of bullets off you while creeping you out.

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8. For no reason whatsoever, members of your party begin to contract a myriad of painful diseases.

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9. Like measles.

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10. Or typhoid.

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11. Or cholera.

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12. Or simply break limbs for no reason.

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13. “Why?!”

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14. A snake will jump out and bite you.

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15. Or your’ll just plain ol’ get tired.

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16. Someone may drown while wading across a stream three feet deep and lose everything you own.

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17. And your mode of transportation can be smote from heaven as well.

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18. After an inevitable death, you get the macabre option of conducting a brief funeral or simply dumping the body on the side of the road.

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19. The game highly suggests the funeral option, as kicking the corpse of your relative off the wagon leads to a loss of morale.

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So yes, you wrote tombstone epitaphs as a 7-year-old.

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20. You yourself will most likely die, out of the blue, from a now commonly curable ailment like diarrhea.

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21. And after your entire party is dead, you will receive this uplifting message:

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And you leave the computer lab thinking:

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But at least you had this to come home to:

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“Positive reinforcement!”

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And in the end you learned the lesson that you have it pretty damn good compared to people 100 years ago.