“Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”
If you’re of a certain age, an earworm is navigating its way through your brain right now as if you were RFK.
Where …
In the world …
Is …
Carmen Sandiego?
That song was the theme to the television show spin-off based on the original property, which originally was an educational game kids could play on their parents’ computers.
I frame it that way to differentiate it from an earlier entry in this list “The Oregon Trail,” which in my experience was primarily consumed at schools. Carmen Sandiego made it to schools too, but just as many people played it at home.
Yes, kids back in the 1980s and 1990s were supremely bored enough to want to actively engage with educational games at home. How do I know this? I was one of those bored kids. And no game was quite so pivotal to the “educate your kids while they play video games!” parenting impulse as Carmen Sandiego.
It essentially justified the entire enterprise of educational video games.
If you want to know how it did that – when so many other games had tried and failed dating back to the Atari golden age – you don’t need to overthink it.
This game was actually fun to play.
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? at a glance:
Genre: Educational
Released: 1985
Platform: PC
Member of World Video Game Hall of Fame
Basically since the dawn of video gaming and computing at home, companies have been trying to position their platform as being beneficial rather than a silly waste of time. One of the main ways has been through the promise of educating children in some form or fashion.
The aforementioned Oregon Trail was teacher-developed, and it aimed to teach kids a smidgeon of history in a palatable way. People died. You shot things with a rifle. Wagons flooded. More people died. It was an entertaining – if morbid – series of events.
But again, it was a game that really caught on in schools and spread throughout the country over the course of many, many years – prior to the point that many had access to computers at home. By the time they did (home computing caught on in the back half of the 1980s and 1990s), Oregon Trail was already something most kids had experienced at school, meaning most children of the 80s, at least the sane ones, wouldn’t find much appeal in trying to recreate that same school experience at home.
“Yes, I played that in the third grade. I am now in the seventh grade. No, I don’t have a strong desire to play it again now, thanks.”
Carmen Sandiego had a similar start, catching on in schools to begin with, but it expanded its reach beyond schools fairly quickly, as marketing and word of mouth eventually caught the attention of home consumers, many of whom by now had the ability to play games at home and took to purchasing the game for their families, something that didn’t really happen before that point.
A LOT of educational games, many of them revolving around math, just couldn’t catch on in quite the same way. Yeah, the timing sucked for those games. But they also weren’t exactly inspirational in their design. No one was clamoring to play “Basic Math” and “Donkey Kong Jr. Math.” They were just … math.
And you get it. Imagine being a kid on Christmas morning and you open a brightly wrapped, video game-sized package and instead of “Super Mario Bros.” or “Space Invaders” you got a “game” which featured multiplication tables.
You would, justifiably, clown on your parents until the end of time.
Even with Oregon Trail, the game had spread throughout schools so ubiquitously over the course of a decade that it didn’t give as much reason to justify its purchase at home. It was a good game … but it was a school game. And it was old news.
Within this environment, Broderbund’s “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” dropped on an unsuspecting audience in 1985, and it shook up the educational game landscape in a significant manner.
Indeed, the brand endures today, having inspired over 20 sequels, several book series, multiple television shows, comic books, albums, board games, a theatrical play and musical, planetarium(?!) shows, and even a friggin’ day (mostly a marketing event to promote the products, but still).
For many folks nowadays, it’s probably synonymous with schools in the same way Oregon Trail and “Dance, Dance Revolution” are. But for the first half decade or so of its existence (after the initial school push), it sold super well at home.
It also seemed a little less like school, in that there was a whole television show dedicated to the thing.
The guys on the show sang a cappella and everything!
I can attest to the fact that the game made it to home consumers, since my dad dropped some coin on the game and we had it for our home PC.
And yes, I played it willingly.
(This is where I shake my fist in angry defiance at my father for tricking me into learning willingly.)
The initial appeal of the property centered on its globe-trotting, exciting aesthetic. And it was through those elements that kids ended up learning some geography, anthropology, and research skills.
The basic concept of the game was that the title character was an international spy, part of a network of villains who were up to no good, often thieving priceless heirlooms and the like. You were charged with tracking these heinous characters down through a series of clues, which would allow you to deduce where they were all hiding out.
No, this isn’t the plot of an “Ocean’s” movie, though now I’m sensing crossover potential.
I want to see George Clooney in a floppy red hat.
Make it happen, Hollywood.
So anyway, within the game you might get some clue from a witness who would say something like “His breath reeked of pasta and he kept saying I was MALE.” You could deduce that you should travel to Italy, rather than some other randomized location like Bolivia or Antarctica.
If you were correct, you’d be rewarded with more clues to help you apprehend the bad person. If you were wrong, you’d have to backtrack and start over like an idiot.
A time limit kept the pressure on, so you couldn’t just endlessly guess wrong about where to go or you’d run out of time and lose.
Your rank would improve as you solved cases, the hunts would get more challenging, and eventually you’d have to capture Carmen herself.
The “capturing bad guys” part of it raised the stakes and made things a little more exciting. And getting to travel all over the world was some wish fulfillment. Not a lot of us kids were travelling to exotic locations like Argentina on the regular. Personally, I was pretty much always stuck visiting my grandparents in lovely “Kansas,” which was an enjoyable diversion from where I lived, in lovely “Kansas.”
The globetrotting in the game allowed us to sorta imagine what that would feel like. And we learned about all of these interesting places in the process.
For example, who knew that people in Italy ate pasta?
Conceptually, the game remains easy to grasp. It came with this reference book that would help you look up facts about places and things that could allow you to navigate the stuff you didn’t know already (this was vital when the concept of “Wikipedia” was still over a decade away). In theory, you’d retain some of that knowledge as you went along (replays of the game would reinforce this, as you’d inevitably get repeat clues and facts to navigate).
Yet in a very practical sense, I don’t remember most of what I learned in this game.
Take that, Dad!
But hey, I don’t begrudge the software for my retention failure. That’s on me.
The game was the first developed internally at Broderbund, which had previously operated as a publisher of outside-developed games. The company went on to create “Myst” before being purchased by The Learning Company in 1998.
Carmen Sandiego really friggin’ took off for those guys, and the television show that aired on PBS in the early to mid 90s became a big contributor in that. On the show, a group of three children contestants would answer geography-based trivia questions to eventually try to capture Sandiego. Again, pretty simple in concept, yet compelling all the same … people LOVED this show, grouping it with some of the best PBS programs of that generation.
I was honestly more of a “Square One” fan, but I won’t yuck anyone’s yum. Also, if we’re evaluating based on theme song, we must be honest with ourselves here: “3-2-1 Contact” was the clear winner.
Eventually, Carmen Sandiego became synonymous with her characteristic red trench coat and big, floppy hat, which I think you can trace back to the cover art from the game’s first sequel, “Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen San Diego?” I never gravitated toward that game or any of the other sequels. There was a bit of a “been there, done that” sentiment there, but I think more problematically, a smaller scale affair that limited the geography to a smaller area just didn’t inspire the same sense of wonder.
“What, you want to go to Argentina? Can I interest you instead in lovely ‘Kansas’?”
This might have been a case where it would have been smarter to slap a big “2” on the box and stick with the original concept.
Despite that decision, the property endured throughout the 90s, then began to stagnate under the new ownership at the turn of the century.
The icon’s more recent dabblings have been confused attempts at reinviting the title character, casting her as a heroine in the Netflix series that came out a few years back.
This makes no sense to me.
What are they actually doing?
It’s a mystery.
Perhaps … a mystery worth solving on a globe-trotting adventure?
We can only hope.
So what makes it worth playing today?
I’ve got a list of games I maintain that ranks the top games I’ve ever played. That list is something like 400 titles deep nowadays.
This is one of TWO games on that list I’d classify as being educational.
(You already know the other one.)
Why this game makes the cut is that it’s fun to play. I know that sounds simple, but if it were easy to accomplish, you’d have a whole lot more educational games on that list.
“Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” presents a solvable mystery at the outset with criminal undertones, upping the excitement levels while simultaneously intriguing the gamer with riddles to sort out. It then offers up the world as its stage, presenting the opportunity to travel, learn, and ultimately feel smug about how clever you are when you put the criminals behind bars.
“Too bad, so sad, Carmen. I know way too much about Nepal for you to get away this time!”
Having originally released on defunct hardware (and by that, I mean old-ass computers), the game isn’t all that easy to play nowadays, but you definitely have options. The game was reworked and released fairly recently for modern platforms as a remake that features actiony bits that sort of miss the point I think but the reviews point to the experience being tolerable.
The 2020 release of the game is available on Steam, and it likewise retains the spirit of the original setup.
If you want to dig into the original game – or most of the sequels – emulation is probably the way to go. Trusty friend archive.org is here to the rescue! And you can check out some other options from around the web on this reddit thread.
If all that sounds like too much work, I guess how I’d wrap this up is to say it’s worth the effort if you’ve never experienced it before.
Much like an international mystery involving treasure thieves, putting in the work here has the potential to offer great rewards.
It’s not everyday you can become a gumshoe!
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original game (um … probably best to check out the archive.org link above)
- 2020 release (Steam)
- 2025 release (Nintendo Switch, Steam, Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Apple, Google, Microsoft)