“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.
Continue reading Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 53)Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? at a glance:
Genre: Educational
Released: 1985
Platform: PC
Member of World Video Game Hall of Fame