About The Mother Road
The Mother Road is a free survival game you play in your browser. It is 1937, the dust has buried three years of crops, and your family of seven is leaving Oklahoma for California. You sell the farm things you can't carry, buy a used truck from a sharp-dealing lot, load it, and drive Route 66 west across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the Mojave Desert to the San Joaquin Valley. Then you follow the harvest for one season, peaches to grapes to cotton, and try to have your family housed, healthy and with money saved when winter comes. The game is built on the model of The Oregon Trail and inspired by John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Every character, line and scene in it is original.
How to play
- Pick your background. A small landowner leaves with the most money, a sharecropper with the least. Harder starts multiply your score by 2 or 3.
- The sell-off. Buyers know you have to leave, so their offers are low. Take the money, ask for more and risk the buyer walking, or keep the item and haul it along.
- The jalopy lot. Every car hides its real condition. You get three looks at each one. Some have been doctored with old used-car tricks like sawdust in a noisy transmission or stove blacking on worn tires. Catch a trick and the price drops. Offer low and haggle.
- The general store. Buy gas, oil, food, water bags, spare tires and parts. Watch the load: an overloaded truck breaks springs, tires and rear ends.
- On the road. The truck drives one day at a time. Set the pace and the rations, drive by day or by night, rest when people are worn down, and stop in towns to buy supplies, see a doctor, hire a mechanic or pick up a day of work.
- Hard country. Tijeras Canyon, Sitgreaves Pass, the California inspection station, the Mojave Desert and Tehachapi Pass each present a choice, like the river crossings in the original.
- Work along the way. Some towns offer a day of farm work: chopping cotton, loading melons or picking. Each one is a short tap game, and how well you work sets the day's pay.
- The harvest season. In the valley you follow the crops for 14 weeks, paid every two weeks: peaches, then grapes, then cotton. Each pay period you read the growers' handbills and pick a farm, choose where to live and who works, and get a pay slip. Handbills promise more than the farms pay, and pay falls as more families arrive.
- Where you live. A free roadside camp, a cheap Hooverville, company cabins tied to the company store, or the federal camp, which is the healthiest and has a school but keeps a waiting list.
- Hard choices. Every pay period ends with one: a labor contractor, a sick child, a field boss wanting a kickback, a hungry neighbor, the cotton strike, a flood.
- Winter. The season ends in December. Your family needs to be together, healthy, under a real roof, and holding enough money to last until spring. Meet all four for the best ending.
Tips
- Use your looks at the lot. "Pull the oil stick" and "Crawl under the rear end" catch the most tricks.
- Carry at least one spare tire and a fan belt. They are cheap at home and expensive out west.
- Meager rations hold people about even. Filling rations heal. Scant rations wear the grandparents down fast.
- Cross the Mojave at night, with every water bag full.
- Keep some cash. A mechanic near a town can save a ruined trip, and the inspection station is easier on families with money to show.
- Put your name in at the federal camp the first week. The waiting list takes time.
- Don't chase every handbill. Moving costs gas and days, and the farms that promise the most usually pay the least.
- Company cabins look easy, but a store debt keeps you from leaving.
The history behind the game
In the 1930s, drought, dust storms, falling crop prices and farm mechanization pushed hundreds of thousands of people off the land in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri. Many loaded everything they owned into old cars and trucks and drove west on U.S. Highway 66 to look for farm work in California. Californians called them "Okies" no matter where they came from. Gas cost about 19 or 20 cents a gallon. California ran agricultural inspection stations at the state line, and in early 1936 the Los Angeles police briefly posted officers at the border to turn back migrants who looked broke. Photographers for the Farm Security Administration, including Dorothea Lange, documented the migration, and John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath gave Route 66 the name "the Mother Road."
Based on The Oregon Trail
The game's structure follows The Oregon Trail, the classic educational game first written in 1971 and published by MECC: outfit at a store, travel day by day watching food, health and supplies, stop at landmarks, face hazards with a set of choices, and lose family members along the way. Here the wagon and oxen become a used truck, the hunting game becomes a day of farm work, and the trail ends in a harvest season in California's fields. The Oregon Trail is a trademark of its owner, and this game is not affiliated with it.
Photo credits
The period photographs in the game come from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collection at the Library of Congress, which lists no known restrictions on their publication. All but two are by Dorothea Lange, 1936 to 1938. The dust storm photograph is by Arthur Rothstein, 1936, and the Route 66 cafe by Russell Lee.
- Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma
- Cafe and filling station on U.S. Highway 66, east of Albuquerque
- Oklahoma drought refugees stalled near Lordsburg, New Mexico
- Drought refugees stopped at the California inspection station
- Oklahoma sharecropper and family stalled on the desert near Indio
- Toward Los Angeles, California
- A migrant family’s tent camp, California
- Squatter camp on the outskirts of Bakersfield
- Roadside ranch camp owned by a large grower
- Kern County camp for migrants
- Migratory field worker picking cotton, San Joaquin Valley
- Small cotton farm, Kern County: weighing the sack
- Night street meeting of striking cotton pickers, Kern County
- Eighty-year-old woman in a squatters' camp outside Bakersfield
- Rainy day in a camp of migrant pea pickers, Nipomo, California
For teachers
The Mother Road works as a companion to a unit on the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl or The Grapes of Wrath. A run takes 25 to 40 minutes, needs no account, and plays on phones and Chromebooks. Questions to ask after play: Why were buyers' offers so low? What did the used-car tricks tell you about the market for cars in 1937? Why did California inspect cars at the border, and who did that hurt? Why did growers' handbills promise more than they paid? What did the federal camps offer that the other places to live didn't?