Oregon Trail Type of Games on Classic Consoles

[Creamhoven]

Hello dear friends of gaming classics,

 

according to my research there is no port of Oregon Trail on any retro console.

 

Why did no one care to do a port of this all time classic, that is still great fun to this day?

 

Are there any Oregon Trail spin-offs, homebrews etc for old school consoles?

 

I am particularly interested in a NES or gamboy (color) version, but SNES would be fine as well.

 

Thank you for your attention.

[carlsson]

There is Oregon Bound for the Intellivision:

 

[+Black_Tiger]

Lords of the Rising Sun is similar.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 21, 2023 by Black_Tiger

[CapitanClassic]

On 3/19/2023 at 7:25 AM, Creamhoven said:

Why did no one care to do a port of this all time classic, that is still great fun to this day?

The Oregon Trail IP is currently owned by Houghton Mifflin under the label The Learning Company (http://www.thelearningcompany.com).  They currently sell an Oregon Trail game for the Switch.

 

They sued Zynga back in 2011 just for creating a set of Oregon Trail missions for FrontierVille. Like the Big N, TLC is lawyer happy.

[Creamhoven]

On 3/19/2023 at 7:45 PM, carlsson said:

There is Oregon Bound for the Intellivision:

 

Impressive!

8 hours ago, Black_Tiger said:

Lords of the Rising Sun is similar.

 

 

 

 

I will check this one out!

3 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:

The Oregon Trail IP is currently owned by Houghton Mifflin under the label The Learning Company (http://www.thelearningcompany.com).  They currently sell an Oregon Trail game for the Switch.

 

They sued Zynga back in 2011 just for creating a set of Oregon Trail missions for FrontierVille. Like the Big N, TLC is lawyer happy.

Thank you for this informative post. I dont care so much about the IP, Id just like to play this type of game on retro consoles.

[carlsson]

Yes, the concept of a game might be exploitable, as long as it isn't set in Oregon or at least bears most of the name or descriptions of the original game (which I thought originally was released in public domain, but perhaps that only applied to the very first, text only version and the more famous, graphics enhanced versions were properly copyrighted).

[CapitanClassic]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

Yes, the concept of a game might be exploitable, as long as it isn't set in Oregon or at least bears most of the name or descriptions of the original game (which I thought originally was released in public domain, but perhaps that only applied to the very first, text only version and the more famous, graphics enhanced versions were properly copyrighted).

Technically, the Zynga lawsuit was due to  TLC claiming that Zynga was infringing in their trademark, not copyright. 

 

You probably could make a game about traveling to Oregon on the trail, and it could contain many of the same elements of fording rivers, caulking wagons, settlers dying to dysentery, etc, because those sorts of things are fundamental to a Settlers traveling the Oregon Trail. (Capcom v Data East) It just couldn’t be a reskin of the game though as later court cases have ruled, or copy too much of the look and feel. The problem is that these are matters of fact that need to be determined in a case by case basis, and whose got millions of dollars to fight?