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

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.