The year is 1983, and the context is a United States that has been devastated by an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, of the sort that was so profoundly feared at the time and reflected in so many films (The Day After, WarGames, Threads, etc.) from the time.
You have, perhaps to your own surprise, survived: you weren’t in the blast or fire radius of any of the attacks and could wait out the worst of the fallout for several weeks in a makeshift basement shelter. But you’ve got to go: there is nothing left for you where you are, and you’re determined to get to the Pacific Northwest, which you think has been left relatively unscathed and where your mysterious, estranged, survivalist brother claims to be holed up. What routes will you take? What kinds of challenges, people, and situations will you encounter along the way? What will await you when you get to Oregon, and what kind of world will there be in the future?
Such is the plot of Oregon Road ’83, a video game that serves as a mashup between Oregon Trail, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and nuclear war fears of the early 1980s. As you make your way from the American midwest to Oregon in your car, you’ll be traversing a fallout-ravaged nation where the population has suddenly dropped by around 50%, where logistics networks and centralized governance have been almost totally disrupted if not destroyed, and where survivors like yourself are asking what will happen next.
Oregon Road ’83 is a game created by Alex Wellerstein, a professor of nuclear history at the Stevens Institute of Technology and the creator of the NUKEMAP. The game aims to be a vehicle for experiential learning about nuclear war. It is deeply rooted in expert analyses from the Cold War and the present about what such a world could be like, as well as entirely realistic models of radiation and fallout impacts derived from Cold War technical assessments created for U.S. government Civil Defense efforts.
Players will need to navigate with an eye toward the essential resources for survival and their own health but also make difficult choices about risk, ethics, and values. Much of the artwork, programming, research, and story development behind Oregon Road ’83 is being conducted by honors undergraduates at the Stevens Institute of Technology, blending its retro late Gen-X/early Millennial aesthetic with the concerns and perspectives of Gen Z to create a game that can communicate across generations.
This game began development in the summer of 2021, and is being actively developed with the hope of being in open alpha/beta in late 2024. Funding for this has been provided primarily by the Pinnacle and Clark Summer Scholars program at the Stevens Institute of Technology, with additional funding provided by a grant from the Outrider Foundation.
The above art is initial concept art and is subject to change. For more updates on the state of Oregon Road ’83, make sure to visit Doomsday Machines, which serves as its sort-of development blog.