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?
The events in the game are random. Importantly:
In 1974, Rawitch was hired by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a state-funded organization that developed educational software for the classroom, and he began to rebuild the game, still using text-based output, for the organization. He decided to research the events of the Oregon Trail that he had not had time for with the original game, and changed the random events, such as bad weather or wagons breaking down, to be based on the actual historical probabilities for what happened to travelers on the trail at each location in the game. Rawitsch calculated the probabilities himself, basing them on historical diaries and narratives of people on the trail that he read.
Nothing in the information about the 1990 update suggests that the events were changed, merely the forms of various minigames, and an expansion of available backgrounds.
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.
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-
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.
