College Humor interviews the creators of Oregon Trail, the old computer game famous for the “YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY” screen.
Brandon Berkenstein, age 9, writes: “What are the dirtiest words you’ve ever used for your team names?” Paul: How about the mud-hens or something like that?
Bill: They have team names now in Oregon Trail? We didn’t do that back then… we just typed in our own names and I think I recall that if you died the next person on the trail would pass a gravestone with the name of the previous person that was on the trail.
Don: In the Apple version, if somebody died, you were asked to type in what you would like on the tombstone, and that was an opportunity for kids to practice all the bad words that they knew.
intern jeff: but you guys must have done it too, right?
Bill: It was too long ago.
Don: Otherwise we would have screened them out.
Paul: We put some silly things in.
Bill: We have probably expressed obscenities over the fact that at the time the game was invented, nobody knew about software royalties. If we had, we’d each own an island today.
