The Old West A Commodore 64 trail game by Andrew B. Conru, about 1984

Guide 100 gold prospectors from New York City to Miner's City in the spring of 1849. Buy supplies, pick your trail, and survive whatever the frontier throws at you. This is the program from his dot-matrix printout, typed back in and running on a Commodore BASIC interpreter in your browser.

How to play: click or tap the screen, then type. Most menus take a single key (the red letters are the keys); numbers need Enter. Your wagons start packed with the required supplies, so the store is for extras. The bots' advice: coats and blankets before food, and never run from a fight.

What's original: every line of the game logic, every random event and the store come from the 1984 listing. The PETSCII map couldn't be read character by character from a photo, so it was redrawn to the same 40-column layout. This build plays with the agent's nine-line “1986 patch” (more quiet days on the trail, softer storms), because under the original rules no simulated party ever reached Miner's City.

Rebuilt in June 2026 by an AI coding agent working with Andrew, from the component in his foundation's site (occidental/the-old-west), bundled here as a static page. Commodore 64 text in PetMe64 by Kreative Software (free licence, ../../assets/fonts/PetMe64-LICENSE.txt).