Westward Ho! is a 1986 educational game based on the well-known 1970s game The Oregon Trail.
The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding his party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley over the Oregon Trail via a Conestoga wagon in 1848. The original game and its later graphically enhanced versions were widely installed on US elementary school classroom computers in the 80s and 90s.
The first version of The Oregon Trail was written for the HP 2100 minicomputer in 1971. An updated version (for the CDC Cyber 70) was first published in the July-August 1978 issue of Creative Computing. In 1986, David H. Ahl created Westward Ho! for his book BASIC Computer Adventures.
Gameplay is basically the same as in the 1978 version and both listings are about 20 KB. The main difference seems to be that the Ahl version has multiple BASIC statements per line and therefore only has about 400 lines whereas the CC listing has about 700.
Screenshots
Title screen
Introduction
On our way…
Hunting for food
Buying more medicine at a nearby fort
Whoops, we've run out of medicine and died!
Download
The disc offers both Westward Ho! (1986) and the 1975 version of The Oregon Trail that was rediscovered in 2011.[1]
Start with:run"disc
Links
- Westward Ho! at CPC-Power
- Atari Archives: Westward Ho!
- Westward Ho! at the English-language Wikipedia