‘The Oregon Trail’ Is Back — and a Little Less Racist
Can a game that’s about colonization become more culturally sensitive if the premise stays the same? A new edition of ‘The Oregon Trail’ wrestles with exactly that.
By Mark Wilson
The Oregon Trail holds a special place in the hearts of many millennials who grew up playing it on desktop computers at school. It told the story of heroic, mid-19th-century “pioneers” who grabbed a wagon and raced out West, dodging snake bites and cholera to eventually reach the promised land and claim their own little piece of paradise.
For many Indigenous people, however, The Oregon Trail told a darker narrative. It was a story of reckless expansion and colonialism, which would displace many Native American populations and fuel a great inequity that lives on today.
A new version of The Oregon Trail — out now for iOS devices that subscribe to Apple Arcade — begins to wrestle with this tension. Developed by an Australian team at Gameloft, a prominent mobile game developer, the new version mostly plays like the old Oregon Trail you know. You get a wagon, buy supplies, and gather a team to join you on the journey. Along the trail, you ford rivers, break legs, and shoot way too many pounds of…
