Carmen wasn't the first graphics-based game, but it was among the first.Ĭarmen Sandiego was the game's main antagonist, the leader of an international group of thieves called the Villain's International League of Evil (V.I.L.E). Make these games, which were kind of hard to play, better for kids.” Instead of relying only on lines of text, Carmen had colorful visuals that accompanied the on-screen text. “The idea (with Carmen) at the time seemed new. “They weren't really accessible to kids,” Bigham says. You had to be quick with a thesaurus, or you had to know a lot. Gameplay, too, was all text-based, where a common gameplay element was to be given a word, and you had to guess the proper synonym to proceed. It was like an electronic Choose Your Own Adventure book. Everything that happened was described to you in lines of monochromatic text, and it was up to the player to imagine the world described. The release of Carmen in 1985 began a 34-year franchise that created 17 follow-up games on various platforms, seven board games, seven book and comic book series, and four television series, including Netflix's animated series, Carmen Sandiego, which released its second season this month.Īdventure games of the early 1980s were mostly text-based. “Once we decided Carmen was somewhat educational, we just wanted to stay as far away from that word as we could, because educational games at the time sucked,” laughs Bigham. It was at that point, Bigham says, that the game began to take on Carmen's international, globe-hopping flavor. Carlston had been fascinated by the almanac as a kid and wanted some way of incorporating it into the game. “Nothing like that had ever really been done,” says Bigham, who calls it a key difference between Carmen and every other game on the market at the time. ![]() ![]() Giving the player a clear objective-track down this thief, track down that thief-was one way to separate the game from the masses.īigham's boss at Brøderbund, Gary Carlston, came up with the idea to include with the game a hard copy of The World Almanac and Book of Facts. Most adventure games at the time plopped the player into a dungeon to wander around, aimlessly unlocking doors and fighting monsters. Bigham's team at Brøderbund settled on a cops-and-robbers theme. Back in 1983, programmer Dane Bigham began working on a project that would eventually become the hugely popular computer game Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? There was no Carmen, no educational component, and no world traveling, but he was already messing around with the concepts of a graphics-based game aimed at kids.
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