Carmen Sandiego

The original game idea started in 1983 from Broderbund programmer Dane Bigham, wanting to take the idea of text adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure, but create a menu-driven interface to be played on the Apple II computer. Initial work was done with Broderbund's "Rubber Room" artists, Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott, creating a game where the player would chase down various crooks. Broderbund co-founder Gary Carlston suggested changing the concept to be focused on geography, anticipating shipping copies of The World Almanac to let players research clues and find the right answers for geography questions.[14]

As Bigham was not thrilled with this direction, he focused more on the interface, and Carlston hired David Siefkin to write the game's story. Siefkin came up with the idea of the player tracking down numerous criminals, and developed several criminal personas, including Carmen Sandiego. The other staff found this name mysterious and exotic, in addition to being a female character they could use to attract younger women to the game. From Siefkin's script, they expanded out the idea of the criminal organization V.I.L.E. - Villains’ International League of Evil – and the ACME Detective Agency – with ACME jokingly considered an initialism for "A Company that Makes Everything". The core gameplay was then established, having the player as an ACME recruit to chase down underlings within V.I.L.E., following geography-based clues to complete their search, and working up their ranks in ACME until they were tasked to go after Carmen herself. The game proved successful, unexpected from the educational market, as it became a staple in many classrooms.[14]

I think the problem is that geography, like far too many things, is presented as dry and dull and boring by people who must have personally found it that way. I don't think it has to be ... We don't use the word 'educational' anywhere on any of our products. The term translates into 'boring' in kidspeak. I prefer 'explorational'.

— Broderbund CEO Doug Carlston, Interview with Associated Press, January 20, 1992[15]

Portwood and Ellliot produced storyboards and initial graphics, while staff completed the software. They used a "Carmen bible" to maintain quality and consistency. Each design team consisted of 8-10 people. If a game idea became dull within a week, it was discarded.[16] Games were play-tested in schools prior to release in order to identify problems. Prior to Carmen Sandiego, Broderbund had been involved in distributing and marketing software; therefore careful consideration was put into how to market the franchise. Awareness was built through editorials in magazines, placement on retailer shelves, and promotions.[16] The launch price of $38 was chosen to suit cost-constrained teachers.[16] Playing an entertaining game at schools led to children beginning to request the game from their parents, leading to a "pull-through effect" in the distribution chain. Brøderbund emphasized that the games were fun and labelled them 'explorations' rather than highlighting the educational aspect.[16] The game play succeeded in this by giving the player a sense of agency while travelling through an adventure and chasing the villain.[16] Broderbund included response cards in their games to gather information, which once in a database could be used via direct mail to sell upgrades or future products.[16] According to New Product Success Stories: Lessons from Leading Innovators, Broderbund had also built an "organisational capacity that supports creativity" and was customer focused on its game development.[16]

From 1986 to 1998, Brøderbund followed the first Carmen Sandiego video game with U.S.A., Europe, Time, America's Past, Space, and Junior Detective, reboots of World, U.S.A., and Great Chase Through Time, and finally released Word Detective and Math Detective. The first seven games of the franchise were each awarded one or more SPA Excellence in Software Awards, particularly for their educational effort. In 1991, Brøderbund went public, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange as BROD. At the time, the Carmen Sandiego games were Brøderbund's second-biggest revenue source, comprising 26% of total revenue; the biggest was The Print Shop, which brought in 33% of revenue.[17][18] By 1997, Carmen Sandiego games had been translated into three different languages and over 5 million copies had been sold into schools and homes, worldwide.[13]

Carmen Sandiego also appeared in three television shows during this era. The World game show was broadcast on PBS from 1991 to 1996 and won six Daytime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. World was followed by Time, which was cancelled in 1998 due to the geography-based premise having "run its entire course".[19] It was acknowledged that history can be more subjective than geography, but the show hoped to tackle more challenging material like the infamous Japanese American internment camps during World War II in a straightforward and educational way.[20] The Earth animated series was broadcast on FOX from 1994 to 1999. In 1996, President Bill Clinton stated: "When I met the co-leaders of San Marino at the Olympics, I knew where it was because of Carmen Sandiego".[21]

After Brøderbund ceased to exist in 1998, The Learning Company apparently sought to redesign the series. The company determined that the brand was stagnating but thought it easier to revive an established brand than start a new one.[22] Under The Learning Company, the series seems to take its premise more seriously and uses character-based humor. Since The Learning Company has only created two Carmen Sandiego games, one of which is no longer sold. This change is evident mainly through the marketing of select Brøderbund products.

The first title released by The Learning Company was ThinkQuick Challenge, a quiz game with a similar tonality to Word Detective and Math Detective, which included the reappearance of Chase Devineaux. The new structure of Time was apparently to The Learning Company's liking since their new version of World, titled Treasures of Knowledge, was similar. The Learning Company decided to return the series to its original focus on geography, discontinuing Word Detective, Math Detective, and ThinkQuick Challenge.

In 2004, Bam! Entertainment released The Secret of the Stolen Drums on the GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. It is so far the only game of the franchise to use real-time 3D computer graphics, although many previous games had used pre-rendered 3D graphics. It was also an action game and while geographical facts were included, learning them was not necessary to complete the game. Although The Learning Company evidently licensed the use of the series as well as some of their own characters from Treasures of Knowledge, this game is not distributed by or sold under The Learning Company name. An animated Netflix series, Carmen Sandiego, aired for four seasons from 2019 to 2021.

On March 29, 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that HarperCollins, a division of American mass media and publishing company News Corp, had reached a deal to buy HMH Books & Media for US$349 million. The sale includes HMH's trade publishing division and computer game franchises such as Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail.

The Carmen Sandiego franchise began with the classic video game in 1985, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?. Each subsequent video game in the series has a particular theme and subject, where the player must use their knowledge to find Carmen Sandiego or any of her myriad henchmen. This series was originally owned and developed by Broderbund, but is now owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

This was the PBS game show designed for children ages 8–12. The World game show was staged in a slightly off-skew detective office, which was part of the ACME agency with Lynne Thigpen portraying "The Chief" and Greg Lee portraying himself as a special agent in charge of training new recruits.[3] Greg was helped in this training by various live-action and animated characters. Among the show's most popular were the members of the a cappella house band and comedy troupe, Rockapella, who also sang the show's main theme song.

The game was played in three rounds: the first round was Q&A, where the two gumshoes with the highest scores proceeded to a second round. In the second round, the two remaining gumshoes had to find the loot, the warrant, and the cartoon crook in the correct order. The winning gumshoe captured the day's crook and later advanced to the third and final round to capture Carmen Sandiego. As Greg shouted the names or places in a region of the world, the gumshoe had to place a marker on the corresponding place on a giant map of that area within a 45-second time limit. A successful gumshoe who placed all the correct locations and captured Carmen Sandiego would win a trip to anywhere in the contiguous United States and later in North America.

The Time game show refocused the show on history, but was otherwise similar to World with Thigpen reprising her role as "The Chief". Kevin Shinick portrayed himself as a Time Pilot Squadron Leader and Rockapella was replaced by a different dance group, The Engine Crew. Gameplay for the first two rounds were much the same as World; whereas the third and final round involved the pilot answering six various history-related questions to open time gates. If the pilot answered correctly, he/she passed through the gate. Otherwise, the pilot had to turn a crank, pull a lever, or do some other task within the 90-second time limit. A successful pilot who passed through all six gates and captured Carmen Sandiego would win a personal computer.

The Earth animated series was a Saturday morning cartoon series produced by DIC Entertainment. The series features the adventures of Zack and Ivy, two teenage siblings who work as ACME agents in San Francisco and are aided by the Max Headroom–like Chief, who had to stop Carmen Sandiego and her henchmen from stealing artifacts from around the world.[24] The series was the first Saturday-morning children's program ever to win the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Animated Program, in 1996.[25] Its episodes have subsequently been aired on the Fox Family Channel, the Pax network, Hub TV, and Univision. The first season was released on DVD by Shout! Factory in 2006[26] and the complete series was later released by Mill Creek Entertainment in 2012.

The second animated series, Carmen Sandiego, is co-produced by Netflix, where it aired for four seasons from 2019 to 2021. In this series, Carmen Sandiego is not a villain or antihero, but the heroine, who is recruited to V.I.L.E. in infancy and trained as a master thief, only to turn against them and seek to undo their thievery.

In the early 1990s, in response to the successful Carmen Sandiego franchise, "editor Sharon Shavers was tasked with turning the games into a book series". She gave the responsibility to John Peel. His research consisted of playing all the games, and this was followed by "Sharon and [him] work[ing] out a format for the series" before he commenced writing. While in the past his natural tendency to add jokes to his work had been looked down upon, "Sharon [actually] asked [him] to put more in". The art was done by Allan Neuwirth.[27] The premise of each choose-your-own-adventure book is that "you are the detective", and each title features "four exciting detective adventures inside!".[28] The books are written in the second person and in present tense, and have removable inserts that provided clues and the identities of the villains. The books are published by the Canadian branch of Golden Books Publishing.[29] Western Publishing was planning a September 1991 debut.[30] Inspired by the video games, Peel wrote 16 new cases in the original four-book series.[30] The books came with insert cards which became important in solving the cases.[30]

1. Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
2. Where In The USA Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
3. Where In Europe Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
4. Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
5. Where In America's Past Is Carmen Sandiego? (1992)
6. Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego, Part II (1993)
7. Where In Space Is Carmen Sandiego? (1993)
8. Where In The USA Is Carmen Sandiego? Part II (1994)
9. Where In America Is Carmen Sandiego? (1992) – this title was, as opposed to the others, "a picture book like Where's Waldo?", and the only picture book Peel ever wrote.
10. Where Is Carmen Sandiego? Calendar (1993) – this title was written for Workman Publishing, and Peel considers it "the strangest – and most difficult – writing job [he] ever had"

In 1997 a series of junior novels was written by various authors and illustrated by S. M. Taggart. Each book in the series was subtitled A Carmen Sandiego Mystery and featured child detectives Ben and Maya as the protagonists. Six books were released:

• Color Me Criminal by Ellen Weiss and Mel Friedman[31]
• Hasta la Vista, Blarney by Melissa Peterson
• One T. Rex Over Easy by Bonnie Bader and Tracey West
• The Cocoa Commotion by Melissa Peterson
• Take the Mummy and Run by Ellen Weiss and Mel Friedman
• Highway Robbery by Bonnie Bader and Tracey West

From mid 1996 to early 1997, four Carmen Sandiego comic books were published by DC in a series entitled Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?. They involved the exploits of Evan Sawyer, "Acme Detective Agency's newest and youngest gumshoe".

• Issue #1 (June 1996)
• Issue #2 (September 1996)
• Issue #3 (November 1996)
• Issue #4 (January 1997)

• The Official Carmen Sandiego Clue Books (Harper Trophy Publishers)[13]
• Carmen Sandiego Mystery Adventure Novels (Harper Trophy Publishers)[13]
• Carmen Sandiego Travel Activity Books (Troll Associates)[13]
• Bi-monthly Carmen Sandiego comic strip in National Geographic Society World Magazine[13]

University Games published a number of board games, and at least one card game, based on Carmen Sandiego throughout the 1990s.[32] To promote the first board game, Broderbund made a special offer around Christmas when any Carmen Sandiego video game was purchased in tandem.[33]

• Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? card game.[34]
• Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1992)[35]
  • The designer is A. Robert Moog
  • The number of players is 2 − 6
  • The suggested playing time is 60min
  • The suggested ages are 10 and up
  • The game has two parts. First, players collect clues to work out which of Carmen's henchmen stole the landmark. Afterwards, players race to see who can catch the crook first.[36]
• Where in the USA Is Carmen Sandiego? (1993)[37]
  • The number of players is 2 − 6
  • The suggested playing time is 60min
  • The suggested ages are 8 and up
• Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? Card Game (1993)[38]
  • The number of players is 2 − 10
  • The suggested playing time is 15min
  • The suggested ages are 10 and up
• Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Junior Detective Edition (1994)[39]
  • The number of players is 2 − 4
  • The suggested playing time is 30min
  • The suggested ages are 4 and up
• Where in Space Is Carmen Sandiego (1995)[40]
  • The number of players is 2 − 4
  • The suggested playing time is 60min
• Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego (1996)[41]
  • The number of players is 2 − 4
  • The suggested playing time is 60min
  • The suggested ages are 8 and up

Where in the Universe Is Carmen Sandiego? is a movie that was made to be played in a planetarium. It is less like a traditional movie, and more like one of the Carmen Sandiego game shows featured on PBS with the live audience as the detectives. This film also featured Lynne Thigpen as "The Chief" and was based on Where in Space Is Carmen Sandiego?. This marked Thigpen's final appearance of the franchise before her death of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 12, 2003. A sequel was later created called Where in the Universe Is Carmen Sandiego? - II.

Where in the World of Music Is Carmen Sandiego? is a concert series developed by Gary Sheldon. It consists of 3 concerts: The Case of the Missing Concert Hall, The Case of the Missing Bells, and The Case of the Missing Pyramids.

By 1991, rumours were swirling about a movie adaptation of Carmen Sandiego.[30] In 1998, Walt Disney Pictures extended a first-look deal with DIC Entertainment subsidiary DIC Films. One such planned film involved Sandra Bullock as the title character.[42]

In 2011, Walden Media announced its own plans to make a live action film with Jennifer Lopez as both Carmen Sandiego and producer of the film with her production company Nuyorican Productions.[43] Writer Darren Lemke was attached to write the screenplay in July 2012.

In 2018, while the Netflix animated series Carmen Sandiego was still in production, Netflix announced plans to produce a related live action film adaptation, to star Gina Rodriguez, who also voiced the title character in the series. Rodriguez is set to co-produce the film, alongside Kevin Misher and the series' executive producer, Caroline Fraser.[44] In September 2021, the official Twitter account for the Carmen Sandiego animated series confirmed that the live-action film was in the "early stages."[45][46]

In the late 1990s, the Metro Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, (now the Oregon Zoo), in conjunction with Brøderbund, ran a summer-long event titled "Where in the Zoo Is Carmen Sandiego?",[47] which functioned as a full-immersion live-action Carmen game in which zoo patrons were the investigating detectives. Actors were hired to play Carmen's henchmen, who could be found around the zoo, and on occasions a costumed Carmen appeared as well, but never in a location where patrons could interact with her. Clues were given out at various stations by members of the ZooTeens volunteer group.[48][49][50] Campers aim to solve the mysteries and return the park to normal.[51][52][53]

In 2016, NPR held an homage to the WinWiCS gameshow entitled "Where in the Mall Is Carmen Sandiego?", in which incoming theft reports from ACME CrimeNet are relayed to contestants who must then work out which store in the mall is being referred to. It was part of the podcast NPR Programs: Ask Me Another.[54][55]

The Carmen Sandiego Licensing Program saw the Carmen Sandiego brand licensed to over 20 companies including HarperCollins, University Games, Great American Puzzle Factory, DIC Entertainment, WGBH/WQED, Micro Games of America, Publications International and Troll Associates.[56]

The Carmen Sandiego Connection website allowed players and fans to discover more about the franchise.[56][57]

Pacific Bell Carmen Sandiego Prepaid Phone Cards were made available.[58]

"Where in the Valley Is Carmen Sandiego?" was a scavenger hunt held in Yakima, Washington in 2017.[59][60][61]

• Where in the USA Is Carmen Sandiego®? Junior Edition
• The Ultimate Unofficial Carmen Sandiego Companion
• Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? TM Instructions
• Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? TM Jr. Detective Edition Game Instructions
• Carmen Sandiego as the subject of an xkcd comic
• Carmen Sandiego easter egg in Wolfram Alpha
• Journal article Where Is Carmen Sandiego: Looking for New Challenges in History