You Might Die of Dysentery in the DarkFusion Systems Gaming Lounge at QWERTYFEST MKE 2024

By Tea Krulos
 
Computers were an exciting developing technology in the 1980s and 90s, and before the visualization of sharing funny cat photos or arguing with strangers became common, educators saw a way to share lessons with amusing computer games. Students would take a trip to the school computer lab and get a floppy disk with a game that they would navigate using arrow keys and letters as commands.
 
Since these games were played using a QWERTY keyboard, we thought a fun tribute to this era would be to set up a gaming lounge at this year’s QWERTYFEST MKE, so people can try these digital adventures. DarkFusion Systems (read more about them HERE) have partnered with us to set up this experience. We’re still working on the details, but here’s two well-known classics you’ll have a chance to play.
 
The Oregon Trail (1985)
The Oregon Trail was designed to teach a bit of American History, but perhaps the better lesson is how to be prepared in life, because if you go all in on food and not enough medicine or ammo in this game, you will die. The game was first developed in 1971 by Minnesota teachers and evolved into the widely known version of the game released in 1985 for the Apple II computer, with other versions that have followed since, including a more recent version by Gameloft..

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Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (1985)
This game, designed to help children learn geography, has continued to have an influence on pop culture– the computer game spawned several sequels, a children’s game show (with a very catchy theme song) on PBS, books, board games, and most recently, an animated show on Netflix. The game’s namesake is a dashing, crimson clad, globetrotting thief that leads a network of criminals. You, gumshoe, use geography knowledge to capture them!

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What else? We might look for more classics, but DarkFusion Systems tells us there’s been a renaissance of QWERTY powered games on platforms like Steam, so we’ll probably give some newer creations a whirl as well. 

​See a full QWERTYFEST schedule and tickets here: QWERTYFEST 2024 SCHEDULE - QWERTYFEST

​This originally appeared in QWERTY Quarterly #4.