A musical film based on the classic educational video game The Oregon Trail is currently in the works.
During an interview with Collider, Will Speck and Josh Gordon -- the directing duo behind Marvel's Hit-Monkey and Sony Pictures' Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, based on the children's book of the same name by Bernard Waber -- revealed that they are developing another adaptation, this time of The Oregon Trail. "It was the only video game you were 'allowed' to play in school because it was educational," Gordon said of the title. "So, everybody would spend their free period in, whatever, science, computer lab, basically playing this early video game."
According to Speck and Gordon, the idea to adapt The Oregon Trail came from Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile's songwriting duo of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. "And they've both been very obsessed with Oregon Trail," Speck said. "We were talking about what we could cook up next, because we really want to do another musical. They mentioned that, and we now have the rights to it, and we're putting it together alongside them and some other exciting people."
Elsewhere in the interview, Gordon explained what drew he and Speck to the project. "[The game] always had this dark band of humor running through it, because your chances of dying from everything from dysentery to a cut to anything was... Basically, every move you ended up dying." He continued, "For us, that's returning a little bit to our roots in comedy, marrying it with the fun of doing a big musical, and also just the ambition of taking that very seriously as well and making a big historical westward expansion epic that's also about dying from dysentery."
According to Speck, the musical film adaptation of The Oregon Trail is in active development, and he and Gordon are currently "putting it together with a writer" before they begin shopping the project to studios. Regarding the eventual search, Gordon added, "And we want to find a home for it where we know it'll get made in the right way. That was a little bit what we did on this project, which was really got the rights, developed, and then found our studio partner. We're finding that to be a really effective creative approach."
Regarding how he and Gordon landed the rights to begin with, Speck explained, "Well, it's owned by a publishing company, and we had to do what we often have to do, and what we had to do for Lyle, which is to give them a sense on multiple phone calls and Zooms of what our intentions are and how exploitive we want to be and how truthful we want to be to the original material and what it's going to look and feel like. People are very protective of their IP as they should be. These guys have so far been great partners in allowing us to take it and run with it. Also, we've made them producing partners, basically. So, the publishers are now our partners."
What Is The Oregon Trail?
Developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, The Oregon Trail was originally a text-based strategy video game released in 1971. The game has since been re-imagined on multiple occasions, with perhaps the most iconic version being the one developed by MECC and published for the Apple II in 1985. MECC's The Oregon Trail was subsequently published for DOS, Mac OS and Windows in 1990, 1991 and 1993, respectively. Numerous other iterations of the game have released since, with the most recent version dropping in 2021.
In The Oregon Trail, players assume the role of a wagon leader in the year 1848. The object of the game is to make it from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, managing supplies, picking routes and trying to keep your party members alive along the way. The game has enjoyed an enduring legacy, due in no small part to its ubiquity in American schools from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s, as well as its aforementioned morbid sense of humor.
Source: Collider