In 1971 a text-based strategy game was developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Pass Dillenberger. This game became what is to be known as the Oregon Trail. In this game, the player guides his party of settlers from Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon. Various random events plague the party as they transverse the rugged trail to their new home.

Most game players will remember the video game made famous with the Apple II and other computers of the era. Not many will remember that this game was originally a text-based game played on a teletype. This game version is the one I played in the late 1970s from my days in High School.

The version that I ported over to Python is the source code of the teletype version. It was written in Fortran and later converted over to Basic. The most significant obstacles in the porting were due to the nonstructured languages that it was written and the conversion to a highly structured language of Python while keeping the look and feel of the original game.