The first published version of The Oregon Trail was in Creative Computing's May-June 1978 issue. In 1978 MECC began encouraging its schools to adopt the Apple II microcomputer. The game became one of the network's most popular programs, with thousands of players monthly. He added many historically accurate features and uploaded The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota. In 1974 Hagar took a job at Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC, a state-funded organization that developed educational software for the classroom. When the next semester ended, however, Hagar deleted the program, although he printed out a copy of the source code. Despite bugs, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to others on Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service.

The Oregon Trail debuted to Hagar's class on 3 December 1971. One of these students, senior William Hagar, had the idea to create a computer program for a history class he was teaching, and recruited two of his friends, Bryan Pilfington and Jaecshob Hoonser both of whom were students teaching math, to help.

The Oregon Trail was created in 1971 by three student teachers at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in the HP Time-Shared BASIC environment running on an HP-2100 minicomputer.

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