Collection Spotlight: Carmen Sandiego and Educational Computing with the Apple II
In our last collection spotlight, we highlighted some Infocom games for the Apple II and took a look at what made those text adventures so influential. This time, we’ll be focusing on the educational side of gaming, following the intertwined histories of the Apple II’s reputation as a classroom computer and one of the most iconic and enduringly popular “edutainment” games of the 1980s.
In 1978, Apple won a contract with the Minnesota Education Computing Consortium to supply 500 computers to Minnesota schools, a move that helped establish what would become a strong reputation as a favorite for K-12 educational computing. The MECC had compiled a large catalog of educational software, and this catalog quickly became popular throughout the country, boosting the popularity of the Apple II with it.
In 1982, Apple began lobbying for a bill that would provide tax deductions for donations of computers to schools, museums, and libraries to offset the cost of Apple’s Kids Can’t Wait initiative, a planned project that would help bring Apple IIs to the classroom. While legislating computers into the classroom ultimately didn’t go through at the federal level, Apple had better luck passing a similar bill in California, and the Kids Can’t Wait initiative placed Apple IIs in almost every K-12 school in the state – around 9,000 schools in total – helping to cement Apple’s reputation in educational computing.
Apple’s push to get their computers into schools in turn created a market for classroom-focused software. The Apple II’s popularity in schools, and the uptake of personal computing for education in general, led to an explosion of educational or “edutainment” software in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While many of the games found in classrooms in the 1980s have faded into obscurity, a few have become iconic cultural touchstones, and none so much as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? This globe-trotting game of cops and robbers cast the player as a detective assigned to track down a series of wacky henchman running larger than life heists of landmarks and major cultural exports, tasking players with working their way up to get the chance to catch master thief and titular antagonist Carmen Sandiego herself. The game tied geography and research skills to engaging gameplay and eye-catching animations, making it popular both as a learning tool and as a source of entertainment and kick-starting what would become a long-running series of educational adventures through space and time.
Founded to market software to law offices, games were originally a side business for Broderbund Software, the company behind the Carmen Sandiego series. Like many games of 1980s, Carmen Sandiego began its life as an adventure game inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure. The company had recently settled on making edutainment one of its focus areas, and programmer Dane Bigham took advantage of the graphical capabilities and growing popularity of the Apple II to rework the text adventure game he had been developing into a graphical adventure that children would easily be able to navigate. After the team focused its educational component on geography, pairing it with the World Almanac as built-in reference material to help players develop research skills in addition to geographic knowledge.
Carmen Sandiego was a hit in schools, and the franchise expanded into spinoffs focusing on specific locations and even travels through time and space. North Dakota’s public school system commissioned a state-specific version of the game to supplement their meager curricular resources for teaching the state’s history (if you want to test your North Dakota knowledge, you can emulate it here). Our school copy of Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen Sandiego? shows off how the game was integrated into classrooms, providing teaching resources that helped educators work Carmen Sandiego into their curriculum.
The game was as popular with students as it was with teachers, spawning both merchandise lines and successful television spinoffs that became iconic in their own right. Carmen Sandiego’s multimedia legacy continues well into the present – in 2019, Netflix released a new animated series based on the franchise featuring the much beloved villain as the protagonist.
If you’re interested in trying them out for yourself, you can emulate several of the Carmen Sandiego games here! Our Assistant Director, Sophie Lin, spent some time emulating Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen Sandiego? as part of her research for this post, and she’s described her experience in the section below.
While researching the Carmen Sandiego games, I played a simulation on Play Classic Games that transformed my modern MacBook Pro into a vintage Apple II loaded up with the Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen Sandiego? discs.
Despite the initial frustration of learning to use a vintage mouse and getting used to a pixelated screen, it is hard to deny that Carmen Sandiego is a fun game—almost too fun to be educational until you realize you have to figure out where the cheese state is without the almighty Google. As I was playing, I quickly realized both my lack of geographical knowledge of the US map and my complete inability to function without Google. With a few lucky guesses, I was able to chase down the V.I.L.E. henchman and climb the ranks of A.C.M.E. as I went from a “gumshoe” to an actual detective. As the game went on, however, the questions became increasingly hard—I must admit, I was conquered by the temptation of using a search engine. In all honesty, I can’t imagine playing this game without quick and easy access to answers; perhaps this is what people complain about when they talk about my generation—our upbringing is inevitably entangled with the development of the modern internet and patience is increasingly rare when any answer is at our fingertips.
The process of finding the next destination also feels like piecing a mini puzzle together by interviewing witnesses and hunting for clues through looking at the V.I.L.E henchman’s luggage. The focus of the game moves beyond memorizing geographical knowledge and facts about cities, requiring the underlying logic of being able to acquire relevant information and observe details that help complete the ultimate objective.
What captured my attention beyond just playing for the purpose of writing this blog is the animations. The highly saturated cartoon characters move across the screen dynamically, often accompanied with a map of the United States or iconic city sceneries that come with fun facts of the specific city. My favorite animation is always the court scene after successfully arresting the V.I.L.E henchman and receiving a call from the A.C.M.E Chief awarding me a promotion.
Sophie Lin, Assistant Director
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