As TBS Sitcom “Miracle Workers” Heads Down the Oregon Trail, WW Celebrates the Iconic Game’s 50 Years Behind the Oxcart

The program effectively spawned the modern conception of edutainment and, more mysteriously, an unsinkable franchise continually cementing its position among tech-loving kids of all ages.

TBS Sitcom - Miracle Workers WESTWORLD: Daniel Radcliffe plays a reverend on the Oregon Trail in Season 3 of Miracle Workers.(TBS)

For a video game whose unshakable grip on the American consciousness stems in part from the deaths of so very many virtual participants in such memorably strange ways, The Oregon Trail itself may well live forever.

It’s been 50 years since Carleton College senior Don Rawitsch asked his Minnesota roomies for help coding a teleprinter-based interactive strategy program in an age before computer monitors. Desperate for time to finish the research module on 19th century Western expansion, Rawitsch intended this first iteration of The Oregon Trail to distract the junior high history class he was going to be student-teaching. The resulting game, for better or worse, effectively spawned the modern conception of edutainment and, more mysteriously, an unsinkable franchise continually cementing its position among tech-loving kids of all ages to become a cultural touchstone.

Thoroughly embracing the game despite its Midwestern origins and deadly implications, Oregonians never tire of boosting The Oregon Trail’s ever-burgeoning legacy. Signature tropes borrowed from the original decorate the routes of popular road rallies and marathons around the trail’s terminus. In 2018, the Trail Blazers tweaked a simulation of the classic graphics and choose-your-own-adventure format to announce their upcoming season. In 2012, the Willamette Heritage Center won an Outstanding Educator Award by staging a live re-creation of the computer program in which Nerf weapon-toting teams hunted antler-wearing collegiates and competed to dig the perfect grave.

Among the countless online games parodying the still instantly recognizable visual aesthetic, Travel Oregon: The Game is probably the most successful variation, developed by Portland animation studio Hinge for Wieden + Kennedy’s 2017 Travel Oregon campaign.

“We tried to represent the beauty of Oregon within the realm of the original,” says Roland Gauthier, Hinge’s executive producer. “Our artists emulated the look and style and color palette. We just made it funnier and more culturally relevant for what people think of Oregonians—you know, health-conscious and outdoors-focused. Instead of dying from dysentery, you’d overdose on kombucha.”

While Hinge’s updated Oregon Trail would garner raves throughout the industry—including a Silver Award at the Cannes Lions Festival—the consumer response was even more dramatic.

“People were recording themselves on social media and posting screenshots of their exploits,” Gauthier says. “There was a huge following throughout the U.S. and even internationally, which was pretty funny. We’d targeted Oregonians and didn’t expect so much attention from outside the state. You had people playing what’s essentially a commercial for over an hour. That’s kind of crazy.”

Growing up in France, Gauthier was only dimly aware of the historic trail when his studio took on the assignment, but he’d seen his 12-year-old daughter playing the game and noted the affection with which his creative team approached the assignment.

“There’s nostalgia to games you played as a child and also cultural mythos,” says Gauthier. “People literally wear shirts with phrases like ‘You have died of dysentery.’ It’s permeated whole generations of adults now. It was really the first—and potentially only—game you were allowed to play at school.”

This must be the driving force behind The Oregon Trail’s deathless charms, and perhaps reason enough to make the characters in the latest batch of Miracle Workers episodes members of an 1844 wagon train. Following past seasons set in heaven and medieval Europe, respectively, the self-described anthology series offers scattershot takes on the sacred and profane in wildly different environments.

As with earlier runs, the effectiveness of the show depends almost wholly upon individual viewers’ fondness for stars Daniel Radcliffe, now playing a proselytizing minister, and Steve Buscemi as a gun-toting reprobate, though early scenes suggest this milieu hasn’t the same whiff of epic absurdity, ennobling pratfalls and crap gags.

From what we’ve seen, the new season avoids directly referencing The Oregon Trail. Former co-executive producer Simon Rich expressly forbade Miracle Workers’ writers from reading the novel and short story that inspired the series’ first and second seasons, and this apparent evasion of the origin material seems to be a method to avoid evoking cheesy nostalgia. Of course, the series may pretend to be based on actual events, but, as with the Titanic or Pocahontas or any other historical blip casting an outsized shadow over the national consciousness, such distinctions seem especially specious.

Put plainly, everything the average American knows of the Oregon Trail comes from The Oregon Trail. And that’s not too much. Some berries are poisonous. Hand-eye coordination and organizational mania help but hardly guarantee success. Do not depend on members of your traveling party because they will soon fade away. Death is almost certain and usually embarrassing. Dysentery is a kind term for bloody diarrhea. Nobody can ford every river.

In essence, we learn that life is nasty, brutish and maddeningly random, with no reward for eluding innumerable dangers along an epic trudge beyond safe passage to hostile territory and the chance to start anew. Bleak, to be sure, though this may best explain the game’s continuing sway across generations.

SEE IT: Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail broadcasts at 10:30 pm on Tuesdays on TBS.

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