Modder tests if waiting 14,272 years will beat the classic Oregon Trail game

Screenshot of the Oregon Trail Time Machine working...almost successfully, since this is the still the loss screen.
Screenshot of the Oregon Trail Time Machine working...almost successfully, since this is the still the loss screen. (Image credit: Screenshot via Moralrecordings, Oregon Trail developed by MECC)

Earlier this week, developer Moralrecordings (aka Scott Percival) posted an extended blog detailing how they and some others created a modded "Oregon Trail Time Machine" in hopes of finding a way to beat the game by waiting at the final Snake River crossing for a long enough span of time that, through an already-existing glitch, should make your party effectively immortal since health conditions are not recalculated when waiting for conditions to improve.

So, it seems simple enough, right? The glitch and scenario needed for an immortal Oregon Trail victory are both present without modifying the classic survival game whatsoever. So, one would think that just doing some regular old waiting long enough for multiple real-life days at this key junction would do the trick. Unfortunately, initial "Time Machine" attempts with the vanilla game involving waiting at the Snake River crossing until the in-game year of 10,000 inevitably resulted in the entire party succumbing to death by disease.

As the Time Machine developer/Oregon Trail modder Moralrecordings explains in the extended post, modding the game to make winning possible in this manner requires some incredibly specific tweaks. Those tweaks include fixing the game's hardcoded "18" at the beginning of every ending screen's year, making the in-game year read properly, and allowing waiting by the river to reset the food starvation factor to 0.

With these two small tweaks, successfully surviving on the Oregon Trail for a simulated 14272 years is, indeed, possible.

To do this, Moralrecordings had to learn how to use Applesoft BASIC and, with the help of the MAME's Apple II emulator, could effectively test and debug the game with and without the selected changes. From that, they also ended up writing an Applesoft BASIC Decompiler and uploaded it to GitHub for other people to use on projects like this.

And Moralrecordings was not the only party pleased by all this— a substantial Twitch following for streamer Albrot, who discovered the bug prompting the modification, has also been monitoring this for some time. For his part in this, Albert ended up being the first person to survive for 15000 years on the Oregon Trail and documented it on stream.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

  • derekullo
    Well now, look yonder by the river! That there’s Old Man Tom, wouldn’t ya know. Turns out he’s no ordinary feller, but some kinda immortal soul, tryin’ to conquer the Oregon Trail. Somethin’ about a “buffer overflow” or some other mumbo jumbo that don’t make no sense to me, but reckon he’s got some fancy tricks up his sleeve!
    Reply
  • lily_anatia
    "allowing waiting by the river to reset the food starvation factor to 0" seems like cheating. "if you wait long enough" is not the same as "if you mod the game so you're already effectively immortal".
    Reply
  • Geef
    I remember a full sized computer being brought into our class room on a cart with wheels and us playing that game to learn history. In the 80s PCs were expensive so I think they only had a couple for the entire school.
    I remember having more access to it because I knew how to use computers. (Was lucky with a grandpa who had one)
    Reply
  • skazzles
    lily_anatia said:
    "allowing waiting by the river to reset the food starvation factor to 0" seems like cheating. "if you wait long enough" is not the same as "if you mod the game so you're already effectively immortal".
    It looks like food starvation factor only goes up if you're out of rations or the weather is bad (which alters your clothing comfort factor, which is the other relevant variable to food starvation factor). I'm unsure if that changes much, as I don't remember the logistics of waiting at a river or how hard it is to get food. I assume you need bullets to get food but are there traders? Either way the variables cheated are weather and food. Not terribly sure how illness factors in either
    Reply
  • blppt
    TL;DR: He got dysentery.
    Reply
  • NinoPino
    "...Moralrecordings ... ended up writing an Applesoft BASIC Decompiler..."
    At first sight it seems to be a detokenizer, not a decompiler.
    Reply