“You died of cholera.”

“Dre died of cholera.” “T-dawg got sick and died.” “Mae died of dysentery.”

How many of your friends did you kill off by accident in “Oregon Trail”? I haven’t run into a student yet that doesn’t have some memory of “Oregon Trail” in elementary school.

I recently gained access to three versions of “Oregon Trail.” All are Windows versions, so they may not be quite what you remember from elementary school if you played on a Mac. What I’ll refer to as the “first edition” was released for Windows in 1993 and is merely titled “Oregon Trail.” The “Oregon Trail: 3rd Edition: Pioneer Adventures” was released in 1997, and the “5th edition” (fully titled “Oregon Trail: 5th Edition: Adventures Along the Oregon Trail”) was released in 2001.

The first edition was the edition I recalled playing in elementary school. Its interface was nice and clean, always displaying some important information: how much food is left, overall health, what’s going on through the scrolling “diary”, and the currently set pace and rations. Good information at a glance.

Firing up the 3rd edition and getting started was easy enough, and I was very excited. I mean, imagine all the cool complexities that could have been added to the original while keeping the diseases just as authentic and amusing.

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed. The interface for the 3rd edition was hard for me to use. I had a hard time just getting a party together from pre-generated characters.

Once on the trail, the problem intensified. Replacing the simple, yet informative first edition view is a slideshow of “scenic” pictures (perhaps cool to kids in 1997, but really too small and low-resolution to be interesting) and a variety of images (without always visible text labels) that represent other information you can see or things you can do. I found myself clicking buttons willy-nilly, popping up all sorts of stuff with more icons that I clicked on wildly. Just getting my list of supplies felt difficult.

A really awesome thing about the 3rd edition was the variety of supplies you could buy. You can take along milk cows, chickens, musical instruments, and too many different kinds of foods, instead of just “rations”. I don’t know how some of the more recreational items are used, but the chickens produced eggs before they died off. (Hey, I didn’t know how to take care of a chicken.)

The 3rd edition succeeds in being more immersive than the first edition ­- camping lets you hear stories from your trail companions and the variety of items you can stock seems representative of the time. People are more interactive in the 3rd edition, and they move when they talk to you. I was impressed, despite the age of the graphics.

The 5th edition had all of the “new” features of the 3rd edition in addition to some poorly-voice-acted history in a parallel plot. Lo and behold, you aren’t the only one traveling the trail - a group of three kids and a mountain man friend of their father’s are going along, too, learning history as they go. The kids are creepily-drawn (they don’t blink!) and smile too much.

As a traveler in the 5th edition, you get to pick where you go - Oregon, Salt Lake City, or Sacramento. Both the 3rd and 5th editions have a rather ridiculous number of jobs for you to hold, including prospector and lawyer, and the 5th edition adds some distinct role-playing elements, including “skill points” that can be distributed into skills like medicine, blacksmithing, Spanish, and carpentry. I thought that was extremely nice. Who says a doctor can’t change a wagon wheel?

The 5th edition improves on the 3rd edition’s interface problems, making gameplay much better, but still fails to provide the useful information-at-a-glance of the first edition.

All versions have the classic ways of death among characters, but the later versions include death by animal mauling (as well as frostbite and some other new ones). The mauling which was a personal favorite.

All editions also retain the amazing hunting system that made “Oregon Trail” so fun. The 5th edition adds in the complexity of a rifle that remains open after a shot until you click to reload it. I missed many a quick deer by getting a squirrel, then forgetting to reload. Hilarity and frantic clicking ensued.

The feature sets of the later editions are too extensive to list, but the key point is that the first and 5th editions are still playable and fun, despite a few quirks. The old sadness at deaths, joy in hunting, and desperation to reach Oregon before the last person dies are still present, which, I think, adequately preserve the spirit of “Oregon Trail”.