MECC

» see mecc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

mecc sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. oregon trail was american classroom software. i was in ankara. the closest we had to a school computer lab in the mid nineties was a couple of rooms of pcs that ran windows and turkish office suites for typing class. nobody was dying of dysentery on the fifth grade curriculum here.

the minnesota educational computing consortium was founded in 1973 by an act of the minnesota state legislature. the initial job was to run a shared time-sharing mainframe for minnesota public schools that districts could log into remotely, which was the practical way to give a whole state's students access to a computer at all in the early seventies. that mainframe ran a text-based version of oregon trail that three minnesota student teachers had written in 1971 as a history project.

mecc rewrote and shipped oregon trail on floppy for the apple ii in 1985 and eventually for msdos and windows through the nineties. by then the catalog around oregon trail also included number munchers and lemonade stand and a slate of other classroom-tested titles that a generation of american kids remember better than the history lessons that pretended to require them. mecc revenue was roughly one third oregon trail across the mid nineties.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the next chapter ~

mecc went private in 1991 when minnesota decided the software publisher business had outgrown the state agency structure. the ipo followed in march 1994 with a solid opening pop from a market that could see oregon trail's brand strength on the retail shelf. the numbers on paper looked good enough that softkey international bought the whole company in october 1995 for three hundred seventy million dollars in stock. softkey then merged with the learning company and took the learning company name.

the learning company was doing fine on paper through 1998 with a catalog that stacked mecc titles alongside broderbund's carmen sandiego line. mattel bought the combined entity in may 1999 for about three and a half billion dollars, which is when everything came apart. mattel had wanted a growth engine to offset the barbie plateau. what it got was a software business it did not understand and could not manage.

~ the long tail ~

mattel wrote learning company down by roughly three and a half billion dollars in september 1999, which was called at the time one of the worst deals in american media history. jill barad, the mattel ceo who pushed the acquisition, was forced out by the board within months. mecc's brooklyn center offices closed in october of that year. the mecc name came off the boxes soon after and the surviving oregon trail titles shipped under the learning company label until that brand also died.

the software itself survived through the twenty tens as a nostalgic classroom cult and eventually as free port projects. the internet archive has a browser-playable version of the '85 apple ii oregon trail. gameloft ran a mobile port for years, and a nintendo switch reissue came out in 2021 from houghton mifflin harcourt, which is what happened to the underlying rights. every so often a computer engineer in his forties reinstalls a copy for his kids, and dysentery kills a child on a screen again.

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