Game

One of the big granddaddies of edutainment games, Carmen Sandiego is one of the top tier games in the genre by which all other games are judged. It essentially formed a genre all by itself, and ESPECIALLY a series. There were spinoffs like Where In History, or even Where In North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego. There was a TV show with a VERY catchy theme song. All that is to say, Carmen Sandiego was huge.

This is the 1989 enhanced version of the original 1985 Apple II release, though the only real difference is that it doesn’t have copy protection inputs, instead having on-disk copy protection. This is where the series really started, here, all around the world.

Game

In Carmen Sandiego you play as a rookie at the ACME Detective Agency, which is basically Interpol, and you need to track down the evil crooks over at V.I.L.E as they steal important historical artifacts. Things like monuments, ancient jewels. My favorite is that they can steal the Abominable Snowman from the Himilayas, and then when you return it, the game says the people there are “thankful”. You sure about that? Anyways, the goal is to catch crooks and raise your rank in ACME before finally catching Carmen Sandiego herself, the head of the organization.

To do this, you ask witnesses about the perpetrator. They can give two types of information. First, they can give you details about the crook. Collect enough of those and input them in your computer and you get the suspect and a warrant, which is needed to win, otherwise they get away. Secondly, they can give information on where the crook was going, and it’s always geographical trivia. Things like “Oh I heard he was waving a red white and blue flag”. That one sucks, do you know how many red white and blue flags there are in the world??? There are only like 2-5 places you can go, the world is basically a web of transport, so you can usually suss out where to go just by having general geographical knowledge.

Get to the end before the end of the week and you get a crook. Catch enough and you get Carmen herself, and win! It’s a fun little time, and a cute way to quiz kids on geographical trivia. I don’t think it holds up for super long play sessions. It takes like two hours to catch Carmen, and that’s a LOT of playing the game over and over, it’s a simple little loop. But there’s a reason this game has stood the test of time and been copied and built upon over and over.