![]() At some point in the early 1990s, Kambui met MECC designer Rich Bergeron, who used Kambui’s UGRRs as the basis for the history and gameplay in Freedom!. You can learn more about Kambui and UGRRs from this recent and excellent write up in The New Yorker. These events placed participants in the role of fugitive slaves attempting to escape to freedom during the course of a night. In the late 1980s, an activist named Kamau Kambui began to run a live action role play event called Underground Railroad Reenactments (UGRRs) just outside of Minneapolis-St. The key inspiration for Freedom!, however, didn’t come from financial necessity or even The Oregon Trail, but instead from a new living history event near MECC’s headquarters in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota. school districts emphasizing multicultural education) as well as an awareness that many of MECC’s previous history titles, namely The Oregon Trail, portrayed a white colonial perspective of the past to the detriment of other groups. But why make a game about antebellum slavery? In their promotional materials for the game, MECC stated that Freedom! fit in with the company’s commitment “to providing inclusive instructional materials,” and their goal to “portray the experiences and perspectives of people from various cultures.” We can infer here that Freedom! represented a nod to the needs of MECC’s primary customer (i.e. Given the context of MECC’s bottom line, it makes sense that Freedom! would be a run-based historical simulation. ![]() It was in this environment that Freedom! emerged. roguelike, resource management, turn-based strategy, high difficulty). Africa Trail, Amazon Trail, Yukon Trail), and The Oregon Trail’s mechanics (i.e. This expansion took a familiar form, with a series of games borrowing The Oregon Trail name (e.g. When MECC was purchased from Minnesota by a venture capital firm in 1991, the company aggressively pursued the expansion of its history game portfolio. It routinely raked in millions in profits thanks in large part to its sale of history titles such as The Oregon Trail, which sold 65 million copies across all of its iterations. By the end of the decade, MECC dominated educational software in America, maintaining lucrative licensing deals with over 1/3 of the school districts in the country. It’s common to see educational games left out of popular accounts of the history of video games, but, in terms of both sales and influence, MECC was one of the most successful game companies of the 1980s. Seizing on the opportunity, the state of Minnesota cut MECC loose, and allowed it to pursue the burgeoning educational software market unfettered, so long as the company shared a portion of its profits with the state. By the early 1980s, however, MECC began to sell licenses for their software to other states, who were eager to introduce computers to their students but lacked proven educational software to run on those machines. Originally, MECC was created to provide computer access and software for students within the state of Minnesota. That year saw the state of Minnesota convert MECC from a state owned nonprofit consortium into a profit-seeking corporation. The story of how Freedom! went from being a worthwhile idea to becoming the object of protest starts in 1983. Moreover, Freedom! was made in a compelling way: from a first person perspective, players had to rely on environmental clues and careful resource management in order to traverse a dangerous landscape filled with slave patrollers, dogs, and natural obstacles. Freedom! was also made by conscientious people: MECC’s development team boasted decades of experience creating educational software, and they relied on subject experts and scholarly sources to ensure the game’s historical accuracy. Unlike Gone with the Wind, Freedom! was made for laudable reasons: to educate grade school students on the history of slavery in the United States, to emphasize that African Americans resisted slavery, and to show how difficult the escape from slavery actually was. Using many of the underlying mechanics of Oregon Trail, Freedom! followed the journey of a runaway slave in the antebellum south attempting to escape bondage. ![]() In 1992, the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation or MECC, makers of The Oregon Trail, released a game called Freedom!. But can’t the same thing be said about historical video games? Is there a video game equivalent to Gone with the Wind? The answer is: almost. The success of Ridley’s op-ed points to an idea almost all of us accept: portrayals of history by movies, novels, and television shows have a dramatic effect-rightly or wrongly-on how we remember the past.
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