#040 - Fur Trader: The Ontario Trail

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre(s): Management Simulation

Developer(s): Dan G. Bachor

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

This week's game is quite a fascinating one. Fur Trader is a historical-educational game of several firsts: the first Canadian-made video game, the first business simulation game... there's also some adventure game characteristics, and aspects reminiscent of The Oregon Trail, which Fur Trader also happens to have an interesting connection to... come join the fur trading expedition!

History

Authorship here is attributed to Dan G. Bachor (via Ann Brebner), of the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This also happens to be his only game credit, which is curious to me, as fur trading seems an odd topic for a psychology professor to make a game on. A brief scan of his available academic works also reveal that they have very little, if anything to do with the content of his game, so there's no help there in determining why he chose to make a game about fur trading. Currently, Dan Bachor is on staff at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

As far as my list is concerned, this is only the second game from Canada - the first being Bertie the Brain, all the way back in 1950. Arguably, it's not technically a video game, meaning that Fur Trader is potentially the first ever Canadian-made video game. And fitting too, considering the game's content is distinctly Canadian.

I'm not really sure what's going on in the cartoon...

After this game was included in Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games, it was ported both to the Sol-20 and Commodore PET computers, the latter by Ahl's Creative Computing, and the former, interestingly, by MECC. For those who aren't clued in, MECC is the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium - the company responsible for developing the commercial version of The Oregon Trail. Fitting, as Fur Trader bears some slight similarities to The Oregon Trail. Outside of that info, crickets, though real-life fur trading role-playing games (furs not included) still appear to be rather popular in Canada as a means of teaching Canadian history to youngsters.

The Game

Fur Trader stands out initially as a type of game we haven't really seen much of up to this point in history: management simulation. There are some lost games that could potentially fall under the umbrella of business/management sims, but the closest games I've played to this would be Civil War and Hamurabi. Fur Trader still remains distinct from those two in that this is a game strictly about running a business and turning a profit. Those other two games certainly involve management, but as a means for a different purpose, rather than the management itself be the purpose of the game.

We ain't buying your clanker junk!

As I've been mentioning throughout the article, this game is also primarily concerned with Canadian history, also serving as something of an educational title. Fur Trader is set in the year 1776, and you play as the leader of a French Fur Trading expedition in the region surrounding Lake Ontario. This year's expedition has been declared a great success, and you are now returning to sell your wares at a select destination. There are three destination forts to choose from, each varying in several ways:

1. The first fort is Fort Hochelaga, in Montreal, and is the "easy" route of the game. The journey is a safe one, with the fort under the French Army's protection. On account of the ease of the return trip here, your furs sell for the least amount of the three forts, and the supply cost is the highest - no doubt to pay for the hungry soldiers.
2. The second fort is Fort Stadacona, in Quebec. This is the "medium" route. The fort here is also under the Army's protection, however the road there is more perilous, requiring your troop to make a portage and cross the Lachine Rapids. The value of your furs here is a middle ground between the other two forts, as is the cost of supplies. The soldiers must be more well-disciplined and less prone to gorging themselves on the available rations here.
3. The third and final fort is Fort New York. This is the game's "hard" route, with the Dutch controlling the fort, and the route necessitating traversing the lands of the Iroquois. One the flipside, this route gives the highest payout for furs, and has the cheapest supplies.

At these forts, your expedition has 190 furs to sell. You get to select how these 190 are distributed between the four different pelts: mink, beaver, ermine and fox. Each appears to have a different value, but the exactness of their value is something that the player can only figure out through doing some external calculations. My initial assumption was that mink would likely be the most valuable, which is generally in line with my playing experience - beaver also tends to sell quite well, while ermine was generally the poorest performing fur during my playtime. Fox pelts tended to have the most variance in value - sometimes as valuable as mink and beaver, and sometimes performing as poorly as ermine.

The starting situation.

On this, I also noticed that there seemed to be a vague formula the game uses to determine how much you get for your furs at each fort. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but it appeared to rely on the total amount of each fur selected, and (like the game suggests) the route chosen. At the easiest route (Fort Hochelaga), I tended to get paid around 66 - 75% of the total of each pelt I had, while at the hardest (New York), it tended to be 90 - 110% of the number of each pelt (again, with ermine typically being the worst performing). The middle route (Fort Stadacona) tended to have the most variance, with each fur netting between 75 - 110% of its total number - mink and beaver being the best performing.

No! My precious beaver pelts!

All this discussing furs a their value is well and good, but it doesn't mean much if you can't actually get them to their destination. Fur Trader makes the difficulty distinction between routes evident by having random events that can occur on each separate route that can cause harm to the year's expedition. Events can affect your overall expedition, or can be specific to one type of fur. For instance, at Fort Stadacona, there is a chance your beaver pelts may be too heavy to make the rapid crossing. Alternatively, your canoe might flip during the crossing, causing you to lose all your furs. At the most extreme point, your game can end early if, on the Fort New York route, your party is ambushed and killed by an Iroquois raiding party. Game over. Yikes. That certainly raises the stakes a bit, eh?

I'll admit, I didn't come across that event on my first playthrough, and it came through experimenting with the different routes, seeing what could potentially happen on each. From my testing, it seems that nothing bad ever happens on the easy route (Hochelaga), and the risk increases from there. The other two routes seem to have two, maybe three bad events that can occur - I'm not sure if I saw them all. One thing I did see was a random game crash, though, and that's also a bad event, but an unintended one.

RIP. Game over.

It's an intriguing game, is Fur Trader. As mentioned earlier, there's definitely some similarities to The Oregon Trail. Perilous river crossings, the threat of native raiding parties... although, Fur Trader is far more simplistic in its gameplay, by obvious comparison. I also detect within some nascent adventure game elements, with the game being more narrative driven than gameplay driven, in some sense. There isn't really a story here, though. It's more a historical setting in which your own story can develop - or, at least, that's what the idea seems to be. That's a gameplay-narrative integration concept that will be more fully explored later down the road, but we can see the seeds of the concept being sown here in Fur Trader.

Anyway, that's a lot of chat for what I've been regularly describing as a "simple" game. There just so happens to be a lot to talk about with Fur Trader, which is a nice change of pace. We still have the scores to talk about, too, so let's do that.

Scores

Time Played: 10 minutes

Difficulty: N/A (Variable)

More or less determined by the player and what fort they choose to go to, although the result of the choice of fort is random to some degree.

Gameplay: 2/20
I can only give Fur Trader a 2, unfortunately, as there's very, very little proper gameplay here, and much is reliant on the semi-random outcomes of your fort choice. The most "gameplay" aspect I can see is figuring out which of the furs has the best value and using that to determine how many of each you take each year. There's also no endgame to speak of, and no real point or objective to the game other than "make money". Unless you die, that is. You can also figure out fairly quickly which of the furs make the most money, and capitalise on them, which trivialises almost the entire point of the game.

I'm being slightly more generous with the score here, because I can give props to the game for its simple attempt at trying to immerse the player in a historical setting. I argued with myself as to whether the immersion constituted a story, and whether I should include the story metric for Fur Trader, but ultimately decided against it. Fur Trader seems more in-line with Civil War or Hamurabi in the sense that it's not exactly trying to tell a narrative, but has narrative elements built into the gameplay. If Fur Trader didn't have this narrative/immersion aspect, I'd probably have given it a 1, to be perfectly frank.

Controls: 5/10
Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary here.

Visual: 1/10
It's not formatted very well at all. There's large chunks of unformatted text that are cluttered and hard to read, like the descriptions of the different forts; the numbered list isn't formatted correctly. The code was ported over to the '78 edition of BASIC Computer Games, so the poor formatting suggests the author wasn't overly familiar with programming BASIC, as we've seen far more well-formatted games predating Fur Trader.

Functionality: 4/5
The game can randomly crash at certain points, but seems to be a rare occurrence.

Accessibility: 3/5
While a lot of reading is required, it's not overly wordy, and the game is intended somewhat for educational purposes. No actual knowledge of Canadian history is required to understand what's going on, either, so I'm comfortable with giving this a standard text-based game score.

Fun Factor: 3/20
I think there's some merit to exploring the possible outcomes the game provides for each fort, and for experimenting with how much of each pelt to take, so it has some replay value and interest beyond its incredibly basic gameplay. The historical setting also intrigues me, but I'm biased as a history nerd.

Overall, Fur Trader only ends up with a score of 18 - just enough to keep it out of the F-tier, and put it at the bottom of E-tier. I do feel kind of bad for the score, as a solid amount of effort has been put in to make something rather interesting. However, it just doesn't fare well from a game design perspective. There's little player agency, and there's just not really much point to the game outside of teaching some Canadian history. Feels like a lot of words for what I'd objectively call a "bad" game. At least it's an interesting kind of bad.

Next week is back to the simple, pen-and-paper type games - a common childhood game that, surprisingly, hadn't gotten the digital treatment as of 1973.