īy 1995, The Oregon Trail comprised about one-third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue. The new version was also updated to more accurately reflect the real Oregon Trail, incorporating notable geographic landmarks as well as human characters with whom the player can interact. It proved so popular that it was re-released as a standalone game, with substantially improved graphics, in 1985. The game was titled simply Oregon, and featured minimal graphics.

The game was further released as part of MECC's Elementary series, on Elementary Volume 6 in 1980. A further version called Oregon Trail 2 was adapted in June 1978 by J.P. John Cook adapted the game for the Apple II, and it appeared on A.P.P.L.E.'s PDS Disk series No. That year MECC began encouraging schools to adopt the Apple II microcomputer. Rawitsch published the source code of The Oregon Trail, written in BASIC 3.1 for the CDC Cyber 70/73-26, in Creative Computing 's May–June 1978 issue.

The game became one of the network's most popular programs, with thousands of players monthly. In 1975, when his updates were finished, he made the game titled OREGON available to all the schools on the timeshare network. Then he modified the frequency and details of the random events that occurred in the game, to more accurately reflect the accounts he had read in the historical diaries of people who had traveled the trail. He uploaded the Oregon Trail game into the organization's time-sharing network by retyping it, copied from a printout of the 1971 BASIC code. In 1974, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a state-funded organization that developed educational software for the classroom, hired Rawitsch. When the next semester ended, Rawitsch printed out a copy of the source code and deleted it from the minicomputer.

Although the minicomputer's teletype and paper tape terminals that predate display screens were awkward to children, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to users of the minicomputer time-sharing network owned by Minneapolis Public Schools. The game that would be later named The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on December 3, 1971.

These are the original core gameplay concepts which have endured in every subsequent version: initial supply purchase occasional food hunting occasional supply purchase at forts inventory management of supplies variable travel speed depending upon conditions frequent misfortunes and game over upon death or successfully reaching Oregon. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help. He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on a HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an 8th grade history class as a student teacher.

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