It's weird how images of this style have become the iconic meme of Oregon Trail, because this isn't how Oregon Trail works.

When you actually lose the game, it takes you to the tombstone screen. Then you can enter an epitaph if you want

and obviously, because it ask you "what would you like on your tombstone", you have to enter some variation on "pepperoni and cheese", especially if your name is ANDY

if you're on the trail and one of your party dies, you just get a generic "NAME HAS DIED" popup.

Importantly, it doesn't say YOU have died, it says the name of the person (because all 5 of you have names), and it doesn't say WHY they died. just that they did.

so why do people consistently remember it as "____ has died of dysentery"?

They're combining two pop ups.
If you died of a disease, it'll pop up a message earlier saying you got it.

and the change to "You" instead of "NAME" is one of those sorts of mis-rememberings that make sense to make the meme more understandable.

like how people quote Star Wars as "Luke, I am your father".
It's "No. I am your father", but adding "Luke" makes more clear who is being addressed and makes it more clear that it's a reference.

and the Star Trek one is "Beam us up, Scotty" when in most episodes it's more like "Kirk to Enterprise, two/three to beam up".

But putting "Scotty" in there makes it punchier and more understandable

so replacing CHARACTERNAME with YOU makes sense, since it makes it generic.
Who has died of Dysentery? Not some random character someone made up for their fictional oregon trail party, it is YOU!

and mixing the "X has dysentery" and "X has died" prompts also makes sense.
It makes it more memorable, and also it's quite likely that your characters are gonna get both prompts back to back, if you're losing horribly

you get FOO HAS DYSENTERY and hit space, only to get an immediate FOO HAS DIED on the next "turn"

BTW, the "You have died [of dysentery]" part is also inaccurate if you try to fridge-logic it to being just a character named "You".
In the Apple II version, if you manually name a character, it'll be in all caps.

You can have characters named in mixed case, but only if they're one of the pre-generated names, and I'm pretty sure "You" isn't included in that list.

like here I entered my name and my wife's name and then left the rest blank, so it autofilled them for me.
Those names get to be lowercase.

(this one might not be 100% accurate: there possibly are later revisions of the game for the Apple II(e) that allow lowercase names)

BTW, there are many versions of Oregon Trail, many with minor differences, but I'm considering all the memes to be based on the monochrome Apple II version because that's how this game is always shown in memes

You don't even need a different version to see this scene in color. You just need a TV or color monitor.
But apparently everyone remembers the game from the cheaper monochrome monitors used in their computer labs, so it's monochrome in nostalgia.

BTW, the Oregon Trail handheld that came out a year or a two ago? It seems to be a reimplementation, with graphics based on the MS-DOS version.

That's this one.
And hey, look what they put right on the packaging?

LGR did a review of this one:

I think they just built it like they did because they were sharing hardware between multiple mini-handhelds (like the Carmen Sandiego one), but you'd think they would have considered getting a monochrome OLED and running the Apple II version (or a port)

it would have been cheaper, and it's not like anyone is gonna pass up being a nostalgia-tie-in product like this for not looking good enough.
If anything, the big failure of the Oregon Trail handheld is that it looks TOO GOOD compared to people's memories.

Since most people seem to remember the game looking like this

PS: weirdly for a nostalgiamonger like me, I don't have any real nostalgia for this game... I never played it as a kid. I was homeschooled so I never got the computer-lab thing, and my local library only had a copy of Carmen Sandiego which I played like twice.

don't get me wrong, I love the game, I'm happy to talk about it a lot because I know a LOT of people do have that nostalgic connection to it, and I think it was a very influential game in a lot of ways... I just didn't ever play it as a kid so any love I have for it is modern.

BTW, the game (at least the tombstone screen) is in the death generator, but only in the MS-DOS edition.
I'm gonna upgrade it soon to support the Apple II version and the shop.
https://deathgenerator.com/#oregon 

You can see the first steps towards the shop-generator here: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1321265557778296834

BTW, the story behind "here lies andy: peperony and chease" is interesting too.
So, when you die, the game doesn't just let you make a grave and show it to you... it also saves it to some spare space on the disk, to show you later.

and on future playthroughs you might stumble across a tombstone, and the game will ask if you want to read it.
This was a neat trick because it meant the game changed over time, even if only in a minor way.

And in shared disks used in schools, you'd see other student's previous deaths. It's a fun gimmick.

but why Andy?

well, because a lot of people playing this game didn't get it... legally. The pirated it. Pirating Apple II games was a huge thing, actually.

and it turns out that one of the copies that got heavily pirated wasn't a fully clean fresh-from-the-factory copy.
It'd already been played at least once, by someone named "Andy" who had limited ability to spell.

so a lot of people got a pirated copy of a copy of a copy of a copy that had already been pre-seeded with the "Andy" tombstone.
A legit copy from MECC wouldn't include any Andy. But most of the pirated ones did.

this was encouraged by how pirating apple II games worked: apple II programs control the floppy drive at a very low level, so they can do some amazing tricks with copy protection, like half-tracks, spiral tracks, custom sector headers/footers... it's an amazing subject

so you often needed a bunch of hacking skill to crack a game and make it copyable, but once it had been cracked, that cracked version could be copied freely because the copy protection had been removed.

so instead of generating new pirate copies from the original retail disks, most people pirating it were making copies of the cracked version, and that's the version that had "Andy" in it. So the Andy version got spread around.

Some versions of the games had a sort of "teacher's menu" that could erase tombstone messages, but the widely pirated Andy-version isn't one of those.

plus if the only version you've played is the Andy version, how do you know if that's supposed to be there? Maybe that was a joke added by one of the developers.
Maybe it was designed by Andrew "Andy" Smith.

but nope! it was either the original cracker or some other player who'd played it before it was cracked. Andy was never supposed to be there, and everyone just remembers it because we all pirated it instead of bought it :)

And the badly spelled epitaph is a reference to the Tombstone pizza commercials, by the way:

note that all the top comments on that video are about Oregon Trail.

the weird thing about "the apple II version" is that:
1. it's not the original version
2. it's not the original apple II version
3. it's not even the second apple II version

The original version was designed for an HP 2100 Minicomputer, and was text-only. It was developed in 1971, then updated in 1975 and provided to other schools in the MECC network.

That version got ported to the Apple II for MECC users as "OREGON" in 1978, then it was released on floppy disk in 1980, before getting an update which added graphics in 1985, called "The Oregon Trail", which is the version people generally remember.

BTW, one possibly confusing historical fact about the development of The Oregon Trail.
So, the original idea came from Don Rawitsch, who was a student teacher (he was a senior at university) doing an 8th grade history class.

He made it into a game, with the help of two other student teachers: Paul Dillenberger and SOMEBODY-DON'T-ASK Heinemann.
Now, there's another game developer with the name of "SOMEBODY Heinemann"... it's not her.

That's Rebecca Heineman, who you should definitely know of. She was a founding member of Interplay, worked on Wasteland, The Bard's Tale, Out of this World/Another World, she did the Mac port of Wolf3d, and designed Bard's Tale III & Tass Times in Tone Town.

But her birth name is also "SOMEBODY Heineman" which could easily be confused with the "SOMEBODY Heinemann" that worked on the original Oregon Trail.
I've not seen anyone making this mistake yet but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before some games history site confuses them.

She was only 7 or 8 at the time Oregon Trail was originally programmed but I wouldn't be surprised if she could have done it. She got hired as a programmer for Avalon Hill at 16, after mentioning she had reverse-engineered Atari 2600 code.

so honestly it wouldn't surprise me if she developed one of the most successful educational games of all time while finishing up first grade.

Nevertheless, it's not the case.

Anyway if you want to play Oregon Trail, it's playable in-browser at the internet archive:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990

and the impetus for this thread was this meme: https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1321332159723020291

that's going around a lot and a few people tagged me in it or suggested I could provide the proper font to use.
not really, because like I explained, that supposed screen is really more the invention of t-shirt makers and memesters, not the game itself