On “Roms Over Baghdad” , a podcast that I am a part of, a few weeks ago we talked about a mobile game called 80 Days. This game was developed and published by Inkle. 80 Days is an awesome game but it was the conversation that followed that was of particular interest to me. It came about that 80 Days, was compared to the Carmen Sandiego series of educational games. Now I know that many of you upon hearing the name Carmen Sandiego probably echoed the iconic phrase, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” That phrase bothers me as much now as then.
I mean where is Carmen?, I cannot remember the last game I saw with her in. Even people who are not really “gamers” at least know the name of Carmen Sandiego. Which, to give credit where credit is due is a big thing for any video game property. This line of thinking led me to dig a little deeper into the Intellectual Property’s history and its status in the hope that maybe others would appreciate knowing a bit more about Carmen and the crazy history of the movement of one IP from company to company.
Carmen Sandiego as a IP was originally created by Brøderbund Software which was founded in the 1980s. Now you may know Brøderbund if you are a fan of the Myst series as Brøderbund published that game. Or if you prefer, you may know the company as the creator of the famous Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing game. (I actually own this although I have no idea why).
Brøderbund was founded by Gary and Doug Carlston, two brothers who at the time were new blood in the video game industry. Gary created the idea of Carmen which he then pitched to Dane Bigham in 1983.The goal was to create an educational experience for kids and to help said children learn about geography. With help from the creative, “Rubber Room”, which was led by former Disney artist Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliot at Brøderbund, the team pitched a number of different ideas about what Carmen Sandiego should be.
David Siefkin was the writer of the game and helped to create much of humor of the preceding game along with the Rubber Room team. In fact, Siefkin was the person that came up with the name basing it off of a Brazilian singer named Carmen Miranda and San Diego, California. Siefkin would leave the project, now headed by Catherine Byrd, the first project manager at Brøderbund, after completing the script for the game to become a Foreign Service Agent. Siefkin would become a career diplomat who has served in Brussels, Washington, Yerevan, Sofia, Paris and St. Petersburg. He is currently the Press Attache at the American Embassy in Moscow. It’s impressive that the writer of Carmen really lived a life of travel very similar to that of his creation. (Also, he has an ebook that is on Amazon right now in case you are looking for a good mystery novel.) Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was released in 1985 for the Apple II. Eventually the game was ported to other systems and sold very well for Brøderbund.
Carmen would go on from this first game to have many sequels focused more on specific locations like, Where in the U.S.A is Carmen Sandiego? or Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?. Each of the first seven games were awarded SPA Excellence in Software Awards for their educational efforts. Carmen also began a transition to other media forms. Two game shows were created out of the Carmen license, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?. These were broadcast on PBS with The World game winning a Peabody Award for creative excellence in 1993. An animated show entitled, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, was also created in 1994 which aired on FOX till 1999. All three were received very positively with good ratings and reviews.
Carmen as a property also moved in the realm of books and comic books during this time with John Peel’s series of books, Melissa Peterson’s series of books and a comic book series published by DC comics from 1996 to 1997.
With such success it is little wonder that Carmen merchandise began to become a ‘thing’ with board games, toys, and various other memorabilia being produced throughout the years for Carmen. Unfortunately, while things seemed to be going good at Brøderbund, after 1995 the profits began to drop with losses continuing for a number of years. Unlike what happened at some studios when financial trouble begins to brew, the games remained fairly good in terms of quality. Carmen Sandiego had several very well received games during this time including Carmen Sandiego: Junior Detective (1995) and Carmen Sandiego’s Great Chase Through Time (1997). The trend of bad Carmen Sandiego games however, started shortly after 1997 as even with so many quality games in the series it couldn’t keep Brøderbund from being bought out by The Learning Company in 1998.
The Learning Company promptly terminated 500 employees at Brøderbund in the same year. This averaged out to around 42% of the total work force at the company. This didn’t stop The Learning Company from making games using the Carmen Sandiego license such as Carmen Sandiego’s ThinkQuick Challenge (1999) and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Treasures of Knowledge (2001). Both of these received somewhat mixed reception in terms of both sales as well as critical reviews. The Learning Company even incorporated Carmen into their series of educational games Clue Finders in The Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade released in 2002. Which, in my opinion, was a fun and interesting way to tie the two game series together.
Mattel bought out The Learning Company who was still operating and making the aforementioned games. Shortly after Mattel had to resell The Learning Company to Gores Technology Group in September 2000. Gores was a private acquisitions firm who quickly in 2001 resold The Learning Company to Ubisoft while the name Brøderbund was sold to an Irish company called Riverdeep. Riverdeep then was acquired/merged with Houghton Mifflin who used to be owned by Vivendi. Riverdeep and Houghton Mifflin formed the Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group in 2006.
A year later Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep announced that it would be merging with Harcourt a publishing firm to at last form Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Now if your head is spinning you can image the rabbit hole that had to be taken to get here. Oh, and The Learning Company ended up as a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt later on after being sold by Ubisoft. So this is where Carmen Sandiego is now after may I say quite a tangled trip through corporate hell.
The Learning Company is at this time not producing computer software or games. Instead they are focusing on making mobile educational apps. Carmen Sandiego: The Secret of the Stolen Drums released in 2004 before the final corporate merger and was the only game released with the license between the years of 2001 and 2009. It was released on Xbox, Playstation 2, and Gamecube to some of the worst reviews of the series,with GameSpot giving it a 4.7 out of 10 and another review citing it as being only for those who were “major fan of the television show and PC games”. Such was Carmen Sandiego till 2009 when the dust around the merger finally settled a bit.
In 2009 a strange French game for the Nintendo DS titled, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? 3 – New Carmen Adventure was released published by Mindscape and developed by Strass Productions which is a group that has eluded my search for any information on it. Most reviews that I can find of the game ranked it very low, with PALGN an Australian game reviewer, stating that it was obviously a slapped together product. Two games featuring Carmen were released in 2011; one Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math which technically is a series of 5 games grouped into a miniseries and a Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a Facebook game. Both have received extremely mixed reviews.
In particular, the Facebook game getting my scorn for including micro-transactions in a educational kids game. Including micro-transactions in a game aimed at educating kids feels at least to me kinda gross. There was also rumors of a luggage based Carmen Sandiego game called Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego’s Luggage? Oh how I wish that was the worst of it. I wish I could tell you that the Facebook game and Adventures in Math was where it ended, but I can’t as one game remains.
Carmen Sandiego Returns released in May of 2015 for the personal computer via the Amazon store for free. Now you may ask how anything free cannot be good but, I will tell you there are good reasons for me to say this Firstly, it is because it does not function as a video game in any sense of the word. It doesn’t open or run, with some even reporting it damaging computers with malware and viruses. For my own curiosity and to be a good journalist, I attempted it and I can report that it does not run and seemingly it is because I do not have the required hardware (a camera) to run it.
In conclusion that is where Carmen Sandiego is now trapped. It is in a Facebook game or if you prefer, trapped in a broken game, take your pick. It’s a shame really. Carmen Sandiego had great games and other media, from the television show to the books. The early games sold incredibly well and were reviewed positively and seemingly had a tremendous amount of care taken to them. Carmen Sandiego as an IP is very close to my heart as well as to many others I’m sure. I feel that Carmen Sandiego was somewhat a victim of its own success so that many companies wanted those intellectual properties and it became a tangled web of corporate trading which ultimately damaged the property itself. I’m not even going to decry The Learning Company and its parent company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for I understand the difficult situation both are in. What I will say to conclude this piece is that Carmen is a good character even if she is a villain. As a female character at a time when there wasn’t a lot of those in video games to go around,Carmen’s games had a sense of humor while at the same time being able to teach kids and even at time adults, about the world around them in a interesting way. Lauren Elliott, one of the designers of the early Carmen games, has a great quote on the subject of Carmen Sandiego games, “By treating children as the intelligent little people they are, the designers had no need to hide from them the fact that they were playing and learning at the same time. Kids knew. The beauty of Carmen Sandiego is that they kept playing anyway.” Just because something is aimed at kids doesn’t mean it can’t be fun for everyone also . My hope for this article is two fold, My first hope is that maybe someone let’s Carmen be made into a new better game whether it be in the style of the first game or something new and different. There is still so much that could be done with such a property in the right hands. Secondly, I hope that it has inspired you to go and try a Carmen game, watch the television series, play the board game or even read one of the many Carmen books. By trying it I hope that you see that they were good video games and deserve more recognition for their achievements both as educational experience as well as for their impact on the medium that we all love.
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