Video Games | Pop Culture | 90s

'The Oregon Trail' Is Back And More Portable Than Ever, And We Can't Wait To Die Of Dysentery

Growing up, we didn't really have the same advanced video game as kids today have. We had to use our imaginations. Sure, looking back it was a little bit less than impressive, but honestly, we had more fun playing those simple games than almost any of these extremely complicated ones.

Oregon Trail is perhaps one of the most notorious and iconic games that we played during computer class. It seemed to be loaded up onto every school computer, so that we could learn all about traveling on the frontier, including the struggles that came with it.

Sure, about 90% of us died from dysentery, but luckily we could just restart and try again!

The choose your own adventure style game gave us a little bit of control over the story, deciding what to do and where to go, all the while trying to survive the trip and the inevitable disease that would kill us all.

Personally, I was never very good at this game. It seemed like my instincts always caused me to die faster than almost anyone else, but I had a friend who was so good at it that she actually managed to survive the entire thing! It was a moment that I'm sure our entire class remembers to this day.

Well, it's been a few (okay, a lot) of years since I've played it, but recently I thought it might be fun to try again. And what did I discover? Target had an exclusive version of the old game on a cool little handheld device!

Seriously, take a look at it...

The little Game Boy-like device has a little game pad, Y and N buttons to help you make your choices and an enter button. It's very simple, but it's really all you need.

It's got all those authentic 80s graphics that you forgot you loved, along with the sounds that are so distinct to our childhood that you might just have a flashback to your elementary school computer room.

So once again it's time to fill your wagon up with food and begin your journey from Missouri to Oregon and see how far you get.

It's actually a great idea for road trips. Kids who grew up with Oregon Trail are at the age now where a lot of them have kids, so they can share this treasured relic with their own little travelers and see if they could handle our awesome games.

There are no cheat codes for Oregon Trail kids, you've got to play smart!

Who else is packing up and getting ready to run to Target right this very second?

Source - Target