Is The Oregon Trail randomized?
I have never played The Oregon Trail before, but I'm wondering whether the path and events are pre-defined or random. For example, does doing the same action at the same point always result in the same result? Or are the results of every action randomized?
In other words, can you get through a play-through of The Oregon Trail by finding the most optimised path and doing those same actions every time, or can you always get screwed over by randomness?
Best Answer
This is a supplement to the existing (correct) answers (with a potential caveat).
The source code may be found here for the 1978 version:
https://github.com/LiquidFox1776/oregon-trail-1978-basic/blob/master/oregon-trail-1978.bas
In it you can find multiple calls to RND, which confirms that the game does include randomness:
2600 IF 100*RND(1) < 13*B1 THEN 2710
However, from what I recall this is not a particularly robust randomizer, it may be possible to manipulate the RNG.
CAVEAT: Though from searching I have not found any speedruns where it was done, it wouldn't surprise me if there were ways to force a particular seed, at which point the game would actually run deterministically so long as the same choices were made at each point. You can verify this using an emulator / save states.
Pictures about "Is The Oregon Trail randomized?"
Is the Oregon Trail historically accurate?
Overall, the game shares a majority of the factual events and experiences of the real Oregon Trail. This observation is important to study because of the use of the comuter game to teach children about the Oregon Trail in a truthful light.Is Oregon Trail an RNG?
Show activity on this post. The events in the game are random.How was Oregon Trail coded?
But the most amazing thing about The Oregon Trail is perhaps how it was made. Coded by three college students in the days before personal computers, its creators built the game over the limited hours they could teletype into a central mainframe.Is Oregon Trail a text-based game?
The Oregon Trail is a text-based strategy video game developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) beginning in 1975.More answers regarding is The Oregon Trail randomized?
Answer 2
I found a way to contact Don Rawitsch and I sent him a link to this question, hoping he might answer it personally. Obviously he didn't, but he did send me a personal reply - I think he thought I had written the question!
Mark - Sorry I don't remember our meeting, but in answer to your question, the events in the original version of Oregon Trail were based on 1) fixed probabilities determined by information from pioneer diaries, and 2) those probabilities adjusted up or down a little at random each time the event occurred. In effect, the probabilities were a little different every time you played. -Don Rawitsch-
Answer 3
Yes and no.
Technically nothing in a computer currently is capable of being truly random, only pseudorandom, and certainly not back in 1971 when the game was first made and released. That said this is usually good enough for most uses particularly since 'gaming' randomizers isn't easy for humans, it is good enough for video games where the level of determinism in the pseudorandomness won't really be noticable.
If you're interested in randomness this is why Cloudflare has a wall of lava lamps in the lobby of their main office - they use the truer randomness of the physical movement in those to generate their random numbers.
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Sharefaith, Bulat Khamitov, Noodles, Noodles