Spoiler alert: they don’t.
The Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail is an educational game covering 19th century settler journeys to Oregon. Starting from Independence, Missouri, the player tries to help their party of travelers cross over 1800 miles to get to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Along the way, there are landmarks to explore and challenges to face (e.g. crossing rivers, hunting for food, making sure supplies aren’t too low). If you’d like to try it for yourself, you can find it here.
The Travelers
Since there can only be five people maximum in a party, I picked some of the most well-known Austen protagonists:
- Elizabeth Bennet — Pride and Prejudice
- Catherine Morland — Northanger Abbey
- Emma Woodhouse — Emma
- Elinor Dashwood — Sense and Sensibility
- Anne Elliot — Persuasion
In hindsight, I should have just gone for the Bennet sisters because there are exactly five of them, but I guess it’s too late to change that now.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this cut-down run through of The Oregon Trail. The original video was around 48 minutes, but I’ve sped up some parts and cut out others (namely most of the hunting bits and the landmarks — which you should see for yourself!). I’ve included commentary to keep things light, but I think the upbeat music is already enough of a contrast to the tragedy that is this journey.
Warning: there might be some flashing
Honestly, hindsight tells me that if I wanted more surviving party members, I should have just let them rest longer. But I also didn’t want to do it all over again, so this is what I have :’)
That’s all for now!
I hope you enjoyed coming along with me on this journey? I thought it’d be nice to do something a little different this week.
All the best,
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