(soothing music) - I was working at a chess camp.

And one of the guys had the computer that was entering the results for the kids, just happened to be Googling, and he Googled my name, and he came up, "Are you the Bill Heinemann that wrote "Oregon Trail"?

I said yeah.

So that spread around the room.

You know, all the teachers, "Wait a minute, you wrote "Oregon Trail"?

Everybody knew the program, and they knew me.

They just didn't know that I wrote that.

- That's probably like being Carole King, you know?

She wrote all these great songs, and nobody knows it.

You're kind of behind the scenes on something that's big.

Don't forget to ask me (ice cubes clatter) about the money we didn't get.

- I've always felt that I'm a little bit like Mozart.

I was involved in this great creation when I was very young, and I've spent the rest of my life looking for the next one.

- My name is Bill Heinemann, and I grew up in the Chicago area and moved to Minnesota (soothing music) when I went to Carleton College.

And that's where the story of "The Oregon Trail" begins.

- We all ended up student teaching together in our senior year.

And we came up to the twin cities here in the fall of '71.

- Where you could get exposure and experience to larger schools, large suburban schools, urban schools as well.

- [Paul] And so Don ended up at Jordan Junior High School, and I ended up at Bryant.

- [Don] It was kind of an exciting opportunity, because the idea was that several of us who were going to do our student teaching that way would be living together in an apartment.

- Of course we became friends, especially living together.

- Paul Dillenberger was one of the wild guys at college, or maybe it's just that he hung with the wrong crowd.

I think I had known Bill Heinemann, because I actually knew the young woman that he eventually married.

- What's fun about Bill is that he's always saying, "Well what if we did this?

Or what about that?

Or let's try this."

You know, he was kind of mischievous a little bit in that way.

- And I saw they had a computer programming class.

So I thought I'd take that.

Well, I loved it.

To me, that was just a snap.

- [Paul] He had that great mind.

He could solve the darn Rubik's cube.

- They are two really fine guys, and their creativity and their skill and their knowledge of instruction was just invaluable to what became "The Oregon Trail" program.

The Minneapolis (soothing music) public schools was actually a pioneering district in the use of computers.

They had teletypes in many of the school buildings.

It had very clunky keys, and you had to push down on them hard.

And when information came back to you, it only came back on paper.

- This yellow paper that would roll out of it, way before graphics (laughs).

It was connected to a computer at the school district, which was a timeshare computer.

- Paul and Bill had access to this connection.

You could get on the computer.

You could write programs if you knew something about programming.

And typically, these mini computers had some small library of ready-made programs that you could just run if you didn't want to make your own.

The fact that we all wanted to be teachers, and we were all excited about doing our student teaching, meant that every afternoon, we'd get home and tell stories to each other about what had happened.

- And so one day Don, I came home from school, and Don had this big map spread out on the floor of the apartment.

And he had dice there and some other.

I said, "What is this?"

He said, "Well, I was thinking of having my kids play a game to simulate being on the Oregon Trail."

- Bill and I kind of looked at each other, 'cause we were math people, and we were also programmers.

We said, "Well, (soothing music) why not put it on the computer?"

- And he said, "Well, I need it next Friday."

Then I looked at my friend Paul Dillenberger, and I said, "I think we can do it."

- When we agreed to do it, Don didn't really know anything about computers, so we fell obligated to finish and see it through.

- It was fun, but it was kind of frantic.

It was this little janitor's closet on the second floor of Bryant Junior High.

But yeah, it was just Paul and I originally just in that little room, me writing code furiously on paper and handing it to him to type in.

- Programming is kind of like your merging of your right and left brains.

Bill was very good, and I was pretty good.

- [Bill] He'd say, "Okay, I'm done with this.

You got any more?"

I'd say, "Not yet.

Why don't you go back and try running the program and see if it works?"

- [Paul] Well I'll buy negative $100 worth of food, and then all of a sudden, instead of $200, now I have $300.

- Every time I tried to fix that, something else went wrong.

It's like a balloon that you squeeze at one end, and you know, the bubble comes out this end, you squeeze that, and it pops out the other end.

- My task that I set for myself was to figure out what my students were gonna do with this that would not constitute wasting time but would actually be teaching them something.

- It was an interesting perspective, because you have the math teacher and the history teacher.

So I would suggest to him things that were possible to do on the computer that hadn't crossed his mind.

"You know what we could do is they could select how much money they want to spend on their oxen, and the more money they spend on it, the better oxen they get, and then they go a little bit farther."

He thought, "Oh wow, you could do that?"

And I said, "Sure, that'd be a piece of cake."

And then he'd come up with these historical facts.

- [Paul] The idea of hunting, something that Bill knew that I didn't know that the computer could time your response.

And so that's how the hunting started.

- The original version you just had to type bang.

When you went hunting, if you got more than you could carry back, that didn't help you at all.

You just lost the ammunition by shooting a hundred buffalo.

You can't eat a hundred buffalo.

- [Don] There's really some quite clever applications of the programming language that allowed "Oregon Trail" to be well a game but more a simulation.

- [Paul] You would have probability ranges, and the computer was pretty good at generating random numbers.

So a lot of it was the roll of the dice, which is kind of the way it was with weather and trips like that.

- [Bill] If you didn't make it there by December, I had you freeze to death (laughs).

I mean, if you've got to go over the Sierra Nevadas in the winter, it can be like the Donner Party.

By the time that week was done, Paul and I kind of looked at each other and started laughing and said, "Hey, this is actually fun, isn't it?

This is the best thing that's out there."

- [Paul] We had our classes try it out first.

- [Bill] Once we got that up and running, they were in a line in the morning before school to see who would play then.

- We knew we had something special.

- Here was a challenge.

They wanted to get to Oregon alive.

They wanted to make the right decisions.

- [Bill] It's that unpredictability that adds to the flavor of the game and to the excitement of the game.

- [Paul] It was interactive.

And this was new.

The fact that you could get that excited about talking to a typewriter, which is kind of what it was.

- [Bill] And they had the same feelings playing that game that the people on the trail probably felt.

- [Paul] It was just new territory.

And there we were right in the middle of it without really knowing it (laughs).

- [Bill] We didn't know how it was gonna spread like wildfire.

- [Paul] Then it got on our main library, so all of Minneapolis started using it.

That program was used way more than any other program.

- [Bill] Computer after computer, all over the Twin Cities was just in that mode where "Do you want to play again?"

Yes.

And it would go from 7:00 in the morning when the first kid arrived at school to 5:00 at night when the last one left, because this was in 1971. so there wasn't really (soothing music) much software available at all.

- And many of them were simply oriented towards logic and mathematics as opposed to having some real life setting attached to them.

- They were nothing like "Oregon Trail".

I mean, not even in the same league.

- We all worked on it together, but it was for his class.

You know, it was a social studies unit.

We're just math teachers (laughs).

- [Paul] My only hope after we finished our student teaching was that someday there'd be a way to take this code and put it somewhere where it could be available to people again.

- It was something we'd done, it was fun.

But it was kind of like move on to the next thing.

- There was a brief thought that flashed through my mind.

Can I get something out of this?

And then I said I don't care.

- This is 1971 that we're talking about.

So the idea that you would create software for a computer and think about marketing it and earning royalties on it as if it were a best-selling book, nobody was thinking about that.

- Sometimes the path will go this way, and sometimes the path will go this way.

It's a little bit of chaos theory there I suppose.

- Paul went into teaching.

I started out in teaching but then quickly shifted over to the computer.

Don went the combination (soothing music) of the two, using computers as educational tools.

- Two years after we got out of college, I took a job with a state-funded organization that could help schools figure out what to do with computers.

- Through someone he knew, he was able to get a job at MECC.

- So this organization, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, came into being in 1974.

When I applied there, I probably didn't realize exactly what the setup was and that MECC was going to be responsible for managing a large statewide what was called a timeshare computing system that had a growing library of programs that people in schools could choose to use with kids.

Then I remembered, well, "Oregon Trail" would fit right in there.

When I got there to start work as a, oh, a kind of an assistant to people who knew more about computers than I did, I asked the fatal question, "Do we need any more programs to put in the library of the computer that we were setting up to serve the entire state of Minnesota?"

And I was told, sure.

- I think he handed it over.

- Yeah, I'd have to say that I, in effect, turned this over to the state of Minnesota and did not consult with Bill or Paul.

And I typed in by hand hundreds of lines of code that Bill and Paul had written.

- So he kind of took it from there, and MECC took it from there.

- I guess in hindsight, maybe I should have been a little more cautious, but I was an employee, so I couldn't sell it to them.

- It was his putting it on the MECC computer, which is a statewide computer consortium, so now instead of just Minneapolis kids using it, the whole state was using it.

And the same thing happened there that happened in Minneapolis.

- Well, that became the flagship educational program of the MECC company.

They have a lot of other things too, but that was their number one bestseller.

- We always wondered, you know, why didn't we get any money for any of that, you know?

- I don't know, it's kind of ironic when you reach your peak of fame when you're a senior in college, and it's all downhill from there (laughs).

- Here's where the story gets a little extended.

MECC really spoiled me (soothing music) for the rest of my career.

I never again found a place that was so great to work at.

Minnesota was a if you'll excuse the expression a pioneer in this kind of work.

And there was no other place I don't believe in the United States where an actual organization in state government was set up to do this.

This was too exciting.

To be in the forefront of a movement where we were inventing something.

There were no books to read.

There were no PhD theses to go to and read about how you implement and integrate technology into a classroom.

We were making this up.

Now at that point, it struck me that I needed to go back and check the history, the data put into the computer that determined what would happen to you on the trail was based on our composite knowledge of the three of us as to what historical reality was like, tainted a bit by memories of old John Wayne movies and, you know, books maybe we read as kids.

So I went into the library, and I found books that reprinted the diaries of people that traveled the trail.

And I looked through the diaries, and what I decided to do was keep score.

So I'd go through a diary, and I would check off every day that it rained, that somebody got hurt, that they went hunting.

And the data told me that 20% of the days on the trail, it rained.

And 5% of the days on the trail, somebody fell off the wagon and, you know, broke their arm or whatever it was.

So I went back into the code and changed the probabilities from what Bill and Paul had guessed they were to something that could be substantiated.

I put in that work, and now we had an application that not only was pretty interesting to people because of what it did, but we could make the claim that it also was educationally sound.

The operator could run a list of all the applications that were stored on the computer and how many times they had been accessed.

Maybe "The Lemonade Stand" had been run 50 times.

And then you got up towards the top.

And there was something that had been run 200 times.

And then you got to "Oregon Trail", that had been run 10,000 times that week.

In 1978 or '79, (soothing music) when the personal computers started to emerge in the marketplace, it so happened that MECC had to make a decision about which computer to support.

Somehow the Apple 2 happened to be the low bid that met all the criteria.

We might've been using Osborne computers in schools today if it had turned out differently, because now, we were selling thousands of Apples through a contract to schools in Minnesota.

And the people in other States would say, "Well Minnesota's kind of a leader in this, and they chose Apple.

I guess we'll go Apple too."

We'd like to take a little credit for helping them get off the ground the way they did.

Oregon Trail was converted (computer beeps) to Apple code by some very talented programmers at MECC, average age probably about 16 and a half.

(upbeat music) This was a chance to add animation to the program.

You could have buffalo running across the screen.

You could have a wagon rumbling along.

You could watch the wagon cross a river.

There was probably an update to the Oregon Trail every two years or so just because the technology moved along.

That's when MECC started distributing software on diskettes outside of the state of Minnesota, because the state wanted MECC to become more self-supporting.

Then "The Oregon Trail" got spread across the country, even around the world, its popularity and fame grew rather rapidly.

Well, it's really an incredible story, because it's very rare that a state would create a service that people would pay for.

I mean, just, just think about it (laughs).

You know, you expect that when a state gives a service, you expect your tax monies to take care of it, and then you grumble about it.

In this case, the state of Minnesota created a special organization that took hold of a movement and created products that people all over the country were anxious to buy.

Fortunately, there was a point in the '80s where we went to the state and said, "Here's a deal that we'll propose.

We'll become self-supporting.

Then you have to free us up from the kinds of rules regarding our finances and our employing people that typically would apply to state agencies."

They said, "That sounds good."

And so somewhere around 1983 or so, until about 1991, that's the way that MECC operated as an organization kind of sponsored by the state of Minnesota but not funded by tax dollars.

And in 1991, a venture capitalist firm approached MECC and said, "We'd like to buy you, because we think that you make a great company."

And so MECC was sold for about $5 million.

Now I'd like to think that there were people in the legislature who patted themselves on the back and said, "Look what we did.

We just generated $5 million for the state of Minnesota."

Think of all the potholes we can fill."

But there's one more chapter.

Five years later, a bigger company came along and said to the venture company that owned MECC, "We'd like to buy MECC from you."

And so they sold MECC to a company called Soft Key I think for $130 million.

And that was the day I really wanted to visit the Minnesota legislature, who had, you know, along the way been somewhat critical sometimes of what we did and groused about how much money they had to put into this thing, and say, "Look, what you did.

You sold for $5 million something that was worth 25 times that."

But the fact that the state of Minnesota built this thing.

And at one point it had achieved such a value I think is something the state should take a lot of pride in.

- I think they made a lot of money on it.

Quite a bit as I recall.

(soothing music) - You'd go to the stores, even Target and stuff, and in their computer section, they had "Oregon Trail", with like with a kid that you haven't seen for a while and then you see them later, wow, how you've grown up.

- [Don] At some point, we were all acknowledged as the original writers of the game, and they had this anniversary at the Mall of America.

And so then they invited us to this celebration, And they had us sign the map.

- And I tried to remember, well the first time I played it, where I had died?

So I signed it about in the middle of Wyoming (laughs).

- Then gave us these jean jackets and new copies of the game.

And it was kind of like we were finally acknowledged as the originators of this game 20 years later.

I don't know what Bill said, but you know, just I think it's nice to be acknowledged.

- More than satisfied, almost overwhelmed.

I didn't think something that I spent five days working when I was in college on would garner this much recognition.

It's kind of goofy.

Sometimes it, when you work for a professional company, you spend hours and hours, and then you'd come up with something fantastic, and you get no recognition for it.

- [Paul] We weren't like entrepreneurs.

We wanted to do things that students would learn from and benefit from, and we're kind of altruistic about it.

- We were just trying to create something that was fun for the kids.

Kind of turned out to be fun for us too.

People often say, "Gee, if you'd got a penny for every time somebody played that, you'd be a multimillionaire."

- Yeah, there's nothing you can do about it.

So you don't worry about it, you know.

It's just, you can think that, well, that would have been nice, but...

But there's more to life, I suppose (laughs).

- Well, what would the alternative have been?

To hang on to it without the opportunity to make any significant money until the '80s came along and software companies were invented so to speak.

I kind of took a prerogative when I went to MECC to do something with this based on the belief that putting something in the public domain was at the time in the '70s, the thing to do as an educator.

I've never lost a minute of sleep over the fact that, you know, we didn't make money from this.

I hope that my former partners would agree that that was the thing to do.

- Well, you know, my Oregon Trail ended kind of in 1971 (laughs).

It's kinda neat (soothing music) to have been part of something that spread out that much throughout the country and then in the world.

Little scary.

- If you lived in the United States and went to school, you played "Oregon Trail".

- When I meet young people who were in school when "The Oregon Trail" was a big thing, you know, I'm kind of a rock god.

- [Bill] When I was out on the West Coast a couple of years ago, kids there found out that I had written "Oregon Trail".

They wanted my autograph.

Oh, they wanted to meet me.

They thought they were the only ones that played "Oregon Trail", because they were in Oregon.

- People started introducing me as Mr. Oregon Trail, which has prolonged itself through this day.

I continually have to explain no, I'm one of three guys who's responsible and that they need to get their due credit.

- I supplied something to the world and didn't ask for anything in return, but I gave kids a lot of fun, and I gave them a good education at the same time, which is the way school should be.

- [Don] To be an educator and have that kind of impact is something very special.

- I'm proud that I'm connected to so many people via this game, to have some impact on people's lives.

And I'm proud of my, you know, connection to Don and Bill.

I'm proud to be part of that threesome (laughs).

Absolutely, very proud.

- So I thought about "Oregon Trail", and I think that there are life lessons to be taken from the use of it.

And there are four that come to mind.

First of all, plan ahead.

There's danger out there, and you need to be prepared for it.

Secondly, be patient.

The journey is long but rewarding.

Thirdly, if you persevere, you will find green valleys in your life.

And finally, even if the water's deep in life, sometimes you just need to caulk your wagon and shove off from shore.

- I guess you can get people together and give them a little bit of a start on an idea, and let them take it from there.

There's practically no end to what the human imagination can do.