What 'The Oregon Trail' Co-Creator Thinks of Apple's Plans for a Movie (cbsnews.com) 51
It's one of the most successful — and oldest — computer games of all-time. This week CBS News Minnesota interviewed Bill Heinemann, who in 1971 co-created "The Oregon Trail" as an educational video game simulating pioneers travelling west.
"It's surprising and gratifying and humbling, in a way, that a little thing that I spent two weeks on has become a worldwide phenomenon," Heinemann said... The game's become known for the many ways players can die, including by dysentery, but Heinemann's favorite was death by snake bite. "It only happened once every several hundred times, and so people could've played it for months and all of a sudden, 'What? I got bit by a snake and died? This has never happened to me before!'" he said.
The game has been the subject of numerous satirical articles by McSweeney's. And long-time Slashdot reader whois_drek points out that a sketch comedy group also based a movie on the videogame in 2023.
So how does the game's co-creator feel about Apple's plans to film a new big-budget movie based on the game? "Surprising to me how popular it's become and how long the interest in it has been around," Heinemann said. "And this is just the next step I guess."
He won't be making any money off the movie. In fact, Heinemann's never seen a dime from the iconic game. He and his two co-creators, Rawitsch and Paul Dillenberger, turned it over to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium shortly after they invented it. Heinemann says it doesn't bother him. "I didn't do it for money," he said. "I did it for just the love of the game and the love of teaching."
Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the news.
The game has been the subject of numerous satirical articles by McSweeney's. And long-time Slashdot reader whois_drek points out that a sketch comedy group also based a movie on the videogame in 2023.
So how does the game's co-creator feel about Apple's plans to film a new big-budget movie based on the game? "Surprising to me how popular it's become and how long the interest in it has been around," Heinemann said. "And this is just the next step I guess."
He won't be making any money off the movie. In fact, Heinemann's never seen a dime from the iconic game. He and his two co-creators, Rawitsch and Paul Dillenberger, turned it over to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium shortly after they invented it. Heinemann says it doesn't bother him. "I didn't do it for money," he said. "I did it for just the love of the game and the love of teaching."
Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the news.
"A Million Ways to Die in the West" movie (Score:4, Interesting)
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After stepping on a poo-covered needle.
In 21st century San Francisco
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I don't get it.
All of the red states in the union despise homelessness. They are too stupid to understand the root cause of it.
Instead of fixing the underlying problem (american capitalism), they either make it illegal to be homeless or ship their bums to warm weather states. Las Vegas, Phoenix, SF & LA are full of crazy, red state bums.
They just send their problems west and start disparaging the cities that can't solve the very expensive problem they created with their stupidity and apathy.
Re:"A Million Ways to Die in the West" movie (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't get it.
All of the red states in the union despise homelessness. They are too stupid to understand the root cause of it.
Instead of fixing the underlying problem (american capitalism), they either make it illegal to be homeless or ship their bums to warm weather states. Las Vegas, Phoenix, SF & LA are full of crazy, red state bums.
They just send their problems west and start disparaging the cities that can't solve the very expensive problem they created with their stupidity and apathy.
“Despising homelessness” is a good thing and your warm weather and capitalism hypotheses don’t hold water - homelessness spiked on the west coast only after it abandoned vagrancy laws, a pattern that was also seen in Europe. This trend accelerated in SF when Gavin was mayor then in all of California while he’s been governor. These abandoned laws made peeing on your neighbor’s porch a punishable offense, made looting a punishable offense, and allowed the courts to force intransigents to choose between jail or a treatment shelter.
Much of Europe has reinstated such vagrancy laws with phenomenal success - Spain is a particularly great example to study. And notice that California’s citizens fully recognize the situation: in November, they just voted in ballot initiatives to at least partially bring them back. The ballot initiatives make repeated looting a felony and increase the ability of the courts to jail vagrants that refuse treatment.
Michael Shellenberger, a lapsed Marxist that once naively believed the same as you, wrote an excellent book on the topic. He worked in California’s homeless organizations for years and slowly realized that they were only making the problem worse - then he researched how cities across the world successfully and humanely address the issue.
Re: "A Million Ways to Die in the West" movie (Score:2)
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There is a massive difference in hating "homelessness" and hating "homeless".
Exactly. It’s only today’s progressives that imagine tough love is the equivalent of “hating homeless”. There’s nothing admirable about allowing intransigent drug addicts or the mentally challenged to spiral out of control and spread misery.
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Right. And the people voting against social programs to help the homeless are? And which political party is it that has an incoming president avidly discussion reducing welfare benefits?
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Right. And the people voting against social programs to help the homeless are? And which political party is it that has an incoming president avidly discussion reducing welfare benefits?
The key is to avoid shallow thinking. No one is voting against effective policies for helping the homeless, and you know full well that there’s zero discussion of reducing welfare benefits for the actually needy. The recent shift that’s ushering in a new party was a rising tide against self-defeating naive ineffective “progressive” policies like eliminating penalties for looting, allowing public urination, encouraging open air drug use, refusing to force intransigents to choose betwe
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No one is voting against effective policies for helping the homeless, and you know full well that there’s zero discussion of reducing welfare benefits for the actually needy
Cities and states and congress vote against provisions to help the homeless over, and over, and over, and over again. Through zoning policies, criminalization, and tax policies our leaders are creating a system that produces and punishes homelessness. And while you are correct, the housing crisis isn't exclusively the domain of one political party (it's driven by rich homeowners like me), there are clear distinctions between Republicans (who took away summer food programs for hungry children) and Democrats
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No one is voting against effective policies for helping the homeless
Food stamps and Medicare aren't effective?
and you know full well that there’s zero discussion of reducing welfare benefits for the actually needy.
Do I now? What's this all about then https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com] ?
The recent shift that’s ushering in a new party was a rising tide against self-defeating naive ineffective “progressive” policies like eliminating penalties for looting, allowing public urination, encouraging open air drug use, refusing to force intransigents to choose between treatment or incarceration, eliminating means testing for welfare, etc.
And you show your true colors. While I don't deny many (although certainly not all) of the things you list are true things they are all local level issues pursued by one or two cities. To tie them to national politics is ridiculous. Your characterizations of various laws are comical as well given you urging me to "avoid shallow thinking" when that's exactly what you're engaging in here.
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Sure! After the run of global inflation incumbent parties are being voted out of office all over the world because even if the economic problems they are experiencing are global issues no political party in most countries has any control over the party in power still gets the blame.
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Uninformed much? Partisan much?
The entire state of California just voted in a series of ballot initiatives to recriminalize the same vagrancy problems that I cited. They bring back penalizing of repeated looting, and bring back the ability of the police to force addicts or the mentally ill to choose between treatment or jail. So is California therefore, in your words, showing its “true colors”? Your self declared empathy has empirically been shown to be toxic, as the resulting decriminalization
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You are working with a set of false assumptions.
By far, the vast majority of homelessness is due to drug addiction or mental illness - not housing unaffordability, lack of shelters, or lack of food.
And, by far, the most successful homeless programs criminalize vagrancy and give police the power to force the mentally ill or addicted to choose between treatment or jail.
This is exactly why the entire state of California just voted to reverse its disastrous decriminalization policies. And this is why Oregon has
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Uninformed much? Partisan much?
Your posts have been dripping with heavily partisan views of the laws you seem to be trying to bring up (but cant seem to list with enough detail for me to talk specifically about.) As in the type of farcical slop you get from ideologically charged "news" shows (in your case, obviously right wing) where people tell you what you should be outraged about every week. Stop trying to pretend you're inhabiting any kind of enlightened middle ground.
The Guardian article just cites bog standard social welfare reforms
Wow, so you read that part but you didnt read the part about much
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This is a much better citation for my point in the prior post https://www.weforum.org/storie... [weforum.org] .
I really have no idea why you seem to think these reductions in benefits is the only thing that can stop our decline into North Korea when so many countries with successful economies and better debt ratios than our own do so much more.
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BUT, there is also clear evidence that when housing prices rise rapidly, homelessness rates ALSO rise rapidly (https://www.tandf
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he researched how cities across the world successfully and humanely address the issue
Yes, by building affordable housing, often funded or subsidized by the government (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/02/how-finland-solved-homelessness/).
Time and time again, these initiatives have been proposed and then shot down in the United States after tremendous political pressure - not specifically from R's or D's - but from (wealthy) homeowners who want their home prices to go up and up and up and up forever and ever by limiting the supply of housing for everyone else. And at the federal level
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Bull. You obviously didn’t read Shellenberger’s book, and are merely citing your own “feels”. Housing availability wasn’t determined to be the major issue. Not even close. The vast majority of intransigent homeless refuse available shelter either because they want to easily continue their drug habit (shelters have rules against drug use) or they’re mentally ill.
The most successful programs throughout the world force vagrants to choose between treatment or jail. California
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Someone needs to get back on his meds.
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After stepping on a poo-covered needle.
You've never been outside your tiny shack in Mississippi.
It’s obvious that this is essentially a lie - it’s pure projection. I’ve been to west coast cities, including Portland and SF, dozens of times over the last three decades and have personally seen the rot metastasizing ever since progressives grabbed the reigns. Your narcissistic pretense of empathy and love of power doesn’t justify dumping societal norms to the point that outright lying is acceptable. Think logically:
One, why do partisan democrats suddenly despise Mississippi? After
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its K-12 rankings have plummeted to 25th place (compare that to Florida’s, which is now near the top of the ranks)
I don't know what "school rankings" you are using, but Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey (all blue states) rank above Florida (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/how-states-compare), and California is still in the top 10. Mississippi, South Dakota, North Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Maine are all at the bottom of the rankings (except for Maine, all red states).
Almost 20% of California's K-12 students are English Language Learners (speaking another lan
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You've never been outside your tiny shack in Mississippi.
Actually I've worked in both. Roads littered with beer cans vs streets littered with needles.
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Believe it or not, it's actually the true story of Annie Oakley with a bunch of slapstick comedy filler about how dangerous it was to be a pioneer.
Re:"A Million Ways to Die in the West" movie (Score:5, Insightful)
I always thought of the comedy movie "A Million Ways to Die in the West" as a good unofficial adaptation of the game "Oregon Trail".
”1883” is probably a far better example. The Oregon trail is only comedic from behind a keyboard. The reality of the story is much more harsh. Dysentery still kills over a million people every year. Pretty sure none of them ever thought dying from shitting blood, was funny.
America hung advertisements in many countries asking for foreigners to come “settle” the West. Oh, the native Indians that will come take (back) their land from you with deadly force? Yeah, the advertisements were ah, light on those ownership semantics. Settlers got to Texas and were being offered guns for sale. To protect against the Indian natives. Not a good sign when the settler responds with “What do I need a gun for? And what’s an ‘Indian’?” That’s how many settlers died. Being ambushed by the original settlers and land owners.
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I see my parents receiving similar advertisements in the mail today. "Move to the Holy Land - Closer to God, great wifi, plenty of land for the taking".
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1883 was rad.
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In an extra feature, someone lists what killed people. IIRC, falling off wagon was #1. If that didn't kill, then being run over by wagon did. There's a great montage of settler deaths including being attacked by dogs.
Careful - if it follows "Person of Interest"... (Score:2)
The main "Oregon Trail" player will end up buried under a concrete slab.
Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Very few survive.... (Score:2)
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I managed it once by luck on the original on an Apple II. I bought a (I think) the max amount of oxen, a big stack of spare wagon parts and spent most the money on bullets. Regularly hunted more than I could carry back to camp. After dozens of tries just got lucky enough not to die of disease or drown fording a river.
He didn't do it for the money (Score:5, Insightful)
but Apple sure does.
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He won't be making any money off the movie.
And apple will keep up the tradition.
Jack Black? (Score:3)
Horror movie? (Score:1)
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But (Score:2)
Apple has never been responsible for a single good TV show or movie, so they'll ruin this just like they ruin everything.
You have died of dissing Bill Heinemann (Score:2)
You have died of dissing Bill Heinemann.
Dissin' Terry (Score:2)
At least half the characters in this movie must die of dysentery.
No, it's not humbling (Score:2)
I keep seeing people say that being nominated for an honor is humbling. Nobel prize recipients [nobelprize.org], Academy award winners [elle.com], etc. Many people have obviously forgotten the meaning of the word. [merriam-webster.com]