YMMV / The Oregon Trail

• Accidental Innuendo: You're fording the river and the water's going too fast. If you don't tie your wagon down, you might lose all of your supplies! Would you like to use rope and chains?
• Awesome Music:
  • "Vive La Compagnie" which plays when you make it to Oregon in the first Windows/Mac version. It's a bright, victorious song highlighting your major accomplishment.
  • II has plenty of sweet music:
    • The title theme, calling you onto an adventure to The Wild West!
    • The Independence theme is a sweet cheery piano tune reflecting the homely town you're soon gonna leave.
    • The St. Joseph theme is the Independence theme but faster and played on a banjo, and very heavenly!
    • The theme that plays when you have to climb up or down a hill or mountain. While anxiety-inducing, it does give a nice realistic sense of tension and suspension.
    • The theme that plays when you raft down the Columbia River, capturing the suspense and excitement you'd expect from an average boss battle.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The amount of things people would do in various editions of the game could easily become this. It's possible for someone to end up getting almost every kind of injury/affliction at once.
• Game-Breaker: In the second and fifth editions, buy some 10-lb sacks of salt and then go hunting. By doing this, your wagon will fill up with well over 1,000 pounds of salted meat which you can trade for essentials.
• Genius Bonus: If you go through Salt Lake City and decide to pay a visit, the background music is the Mormon hymn "Come, Come ye Saints”.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • As noted in the Kaizo Trap entry on the main page, it's possible to die after winning the game, leading to the hilarious situation of you being elected as a city council member, opening a business, or raising money to help Civil War widows despite having died decades earlier. As one YouTube comment said, "the county board of supervisors elects people 25 years after their death, no wonder they never get anything done."
  • Also, it is possible if the rest of the party is dead that the wagon leader can get hit with the 'got lost' event, failed to be found, and the wagon can continue on with no one aboard.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • You have died of dysentery.
  • However, you were only able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon.
  • Here lies andy, peperony and chease.^explanationBack in the 90s, the American frozen pizza brand Tombstone ran ads with the slogan "What do you want on your Tombstone?", usually in a bait-and-switch scenario involving a cowboy seemingly facing execution. Hence, kids putting "pepperoni and cheese" on their grave markers.
  • Sorry, but no one's got insert trade item here to spare.
  • From Something Awful's Let's Plays:
    • Fording every river, including the Mississippi and the Missouri
    • Needs more bacon!
    • WE LOST BACON YOU DICKS!
  • Anything regarding to Bacon, due to it being the cheapest form of protein aside from Pemmican
    • Iliza from Last Comic Standing also got into this, mentioning things like how she left with only bacon and said "I don't know, give him bacon" in response to every possible ailment and situation.
  • From 4chan threads:
    • YOU WILL FORD THAT SHIT!!! Essentially, any river you come across no matter what size or depth you must be a man and ford it.
  • "You have died from exposure" is a popular reaction image among artists venting about being asked to work for free.
  • Grandfather clocks being the most obviously useless item you can purchase for your journey. (Not present in the original game, but included as a Joke Item in Oregon Trail II and its successors. More sarcastic LPs often feature the purchase of several grandfather clocks just for the heck of it.)
• Most Wonderful Sound: In the Windows/Mac version of the first Oregon Trail, the sound that plays whenever a sick party member recovers or the sound that plays when you find wild fruit.
• Nightmare Fuel: Oregon Trail II's DUN DUN! of death.
  • In the 2001 version, it will play even during events that don't hamper you, like finding an abandoned storage with helpful items left over.
  • Also the weird illness/injury noise. "Peggy Sue has cholera."
  • The hill music in II can be rather startling when you abruptly switch from cheerful trail music to dramatic, ominous, loud music.
  • Randall Morgan in the third edition. If you talk to him when the wagons are circled, there's a chance he'll start talking about how the "dark ain't natural." He goes on to vaguely, but with obvious terror, describe the "things" living in the dark that are trying to find him, and how he'll fight them with his fists if they ever do. It's more tragic than anything in hindsight, as it's pretty likely he has schizophrenia...either that or Eldritch Abominations really are stalking the caravan.
  • Snake bites in the third edition, if you get one from hunting. If you shot at a snake and missed, the snake would suddenly appear much closer to you with a Slasher Smile. It would then stick out its tongue and bite in your direction.
• Older Than They Think: The game's popularity exploded in the mid-80s, but the original version for the HP 2100 was produced in 1971. This makes it older than Pong.^note It was text-based, and therefore technically not a video game, so it is not an older video game than Pong is, though there are several other games that are. However it should be noted that many features of the game as we know it today, including the iconic hunting minigame, were not introduced until the 1985 remake for the Apple ][.
• Parody Displacement: The "Here lies andy, peperony and chease" epitaph is now better-known than the Tombstone Pizza commercials it references.
• Polished Port: The 1975 CDC Cyber version was a major improvement over the 1971 original in historical accuracy: the probability of random events was adjusted to match real life, and friendly Indians were added.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The iPad version is an an infamously terrible mess. The game will crash in numerous moments during simple tasks like when trading or buying an ox, buffalo or cow, the game has a memory leak problem and the entire game can sometimes slow to a crawl, The music can just randomly stop playing, and the game's a massive 330MB download and expands to a whopping 1.2GB upon decompression. And as a final kick to the groin to those who still have the game installed on an OG iPad or very old iPhone, the game requires a Wi-Fi connection to Gameloft's servers to work. Said servers shut down a while ago, so since then launching the game gives you a blank screen and drops you back to the launcher several seconds later. If you paid a lot of money on this game, this is especially infuriating.
  • The Wii version of the game is pretty dreadful. It is an ugly game with a lot of muddy brown textures that make it look like a low-end Nintendo 64 game, which is especially bad given its long loading times. The educational aspects of the game has also inexplicably been removed, depriving it of much of its purpose and personality.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the original version, you can take a limit of 100 pounds of meat while hunting, which means that most of the meat on that buffalo you just shot will go to waste. Remedied in later you can acquire 200 pounds of meat, sometimes a little more depending on how many party members you have.
  • Trading in the first game. It's a crapshoot to get someone who has what you need and the game goes to the next day regardless of the result. Multiple failed attempts will deplete your food supply and cost you some traveling time. At least later games give you the option to haggle.
  • Accidental gunshot wounds in the second and fifth editions. They appear randomly after you finish hunting and will sometimes kill you instantly, ending your game even if your other party members are still living. If not, they will severely injure you and leave you to die a slow, painful death. These can even happen without firing a single shot!
    • Similarly, you can also get mauled by a bear or a mountain lion (the latter of which you can't shoot) after hunting, and you'll either get killed instantly or keep taking turns for the worse until you die.
    • In the third edition, accidental gunshot wounds are self-imposed. They can only happen if you shoot before the game reloads the gun for you (which takes about a second) and they are much less lethal.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: "Can you kill the WHOLE PARTY before getting to the first fort?" or "Can you get to Oregon with NO DEATHS?" The latter is actually more possible in the later games, assuming you're pragmatic when you pick your gear (don't bring the cast-iron stove, it's a dead-weight) and you don't make really stupid decisions (piss off local Native Americans, wait to hunt until you're totally out of food and desperate).
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: Many kids went straight to the hunting minigame and didn't bother with the rest of the game.
• Tear Jerker:
  • If everyone in your party dies on the Apple ][ version, you are treated to a large tombstone bearing the leader's name as "Taps" plays.
  • In the Windows/Mac version of the first Oregon Trail, whenever a party member dies, it plays an extremely sad instrumental piece. Oregon Trail Deluxe for DOS's death song (which is instead used when all of your party members die in the Windows/Mac version) is pretty sad as well. Combine that with the picture that's used in either version and it's hard not to cry.
  • The New Year's Eve event in the Windows 95 port plays Auld Lang Syne.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint over a new add-on for the iPhone edition; if you pay real money, you can buy in-game money and therefore get a higher score. This means paying little or no money means you risk a lower score. Fans weren't amused.