Carmen Sandiego (video game series)

Background In 1983, the founders of Broderbund Software, Gary and Doug Carlston, publicly discussed a plan to make edutainment one of their company's three focus areas. The character of Carmen Sandiego was developed by David Siefkin, who drafted the first script of the game for Broderbund beside the Strawberry Canyon swimming pool of the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. Siefkin combined the character's first and last names from the Brazilian singer and actress Carmen Miranda and the city of San Diego, California. Carmen Sandiego was just one of several villains in the original script. She was chosen for the title role by the early project manager Katherine Bird because her name suggested mystery and exoticism, as well as humor. Siefkin departed the project shortly after writing the first script to become a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. State Department, and served as a press and cultural attaché. Gameplay The first game in the series released in 1985, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, was designed and written by Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott, and programmed by Dane Bigham. It established an original formula that was followed very faithfully in all Carmen Sandiego games. This formula involves a series of missions in which the computer player tracks and apprehends each of Carmen Sandiego's enemies. Each case begins with the player being alerted that a spectacular theft has been committed. Immediately transported to the scene of the crime, the player must find clues to infer the suspect's next destination and to create an arrest warrant describing the guilty party's attributes. The culprit travels through a series of different locations around the world in an attempt to shake off any pursuers, so the player will have to continue tracking the thief for some time. The game continues in this manner until the player catches up with the culprit, at which point the thief is arrested, and if the warrant is correct, the player puts the thief in ACME prison. As more and more thieves are arrested, the player rises up through ACME's ranks, and the later cases assigned to the player will become more difficult. On the final case, the perpetrator is revealed to be Carmen Sandiego herself, and the game ends when the player successfully captures her and is later inducted into the ACME Hall of Fame. With the release of Word Detective, Math Detective, and Great Chase Through Time, Broderbund began to abandon the original formula in 1997. Word Detective and Math Detective involves the player infiltrating V.I.L.E. hideouts around the world and therefore maintain the globe-hopping element of previous games. However, Great Chase Through Time completely abandoned the series' original formula and has the player spending each mission in one time period, where the goal is to create makeshift solutions to any historical problems that the theft has caused and find the thief whom Carmen Sandiego has dropped off. The final mission of the game involves the player to track down Carmen Sandiego similar to the traditional formula, although the player does not construct a warrant. Style of humor The games created by Broderbund featured silly humor with a distinctive style of word play with extensive use of puns, rhymes, and alliteration. This style of word play was also present, in varying degrees, in all three Carmen Sandiego television shows. Gag names ("Hardley Worthit", "Rob M. Blind", "Ruth Less", "Joy Ryder", "M. T. Pockets", etc.) were quite frequently used in the games, often to the point where Carmen herself seemed to be the only person without such a name. Clues about the suspect's next destination often used extended puns (example: "I pumped her for information, but her unrefined answer only suggested a crude plan to visit oil wells near Ahvaz") or rhyming couplets. Even as the games began to abandon their original formula, this word play was still retained. For example, a news report on massive blackouts from Carmen Sandiego Math Detective quotes an official as saying, "We're taking a dim view of the situation". Although Carmen's V.I.L.E. gang members were often portrayed as cartoonish buffoons, they seemed to be capable of "stealing" landmarks, cities, national parks, notable cultural exports (such as "stealing all the sushi from Japan") and the like. Her thieves have also been known to steal geographic features and even nonexistent map features such as the Mason–Dixon line. Some thefts were even non sequiturs based on word play, such as "robbing the banks of the Nile" or plays on the word "steal" such as "stealing the show". ==Video games by Broderbund==