Carmen Sandiego was one of the 90s weirdest franchises

Well, we can all be right here. I mean, neither me nor my alleged Carmen fan friends actually watched all that other Carmen spin off stuff. We just like that it existed. I think we’d aged out of the IP by then. :grin:

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People tend to reboot things like that because they wanna share it with their own kids for whatever reason. Lotta people in my age bracket and a little younger have young kids now. Demographics and economics pretty much tell the whole story of why reboot this and why now with a bit of social bonding thrown in somewhere. Some things will turn out inspiring another generation with great new takes, some won’t.

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Nah; I just cant let our young Mr. Nealy off the hook quite that easily.

*lolz

The mistaken anecdote was spoken out of youthful inexperience and broad assumption.

It happens.

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Didn’t the included almanac serve as a copy protection device?

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I rebooted all the Sid and Marty Krofft stuff like HR Pufnstuf, Sigmund and The Sea Monsters, the original Land of The Lost, etc… by playing the VHS tapes for our kid when she was young. She loved it just the way it was.

Some stuff never needed rebooting except to try and milk the cash out of it. You can’t recreate the 70s (or whatever era your childhood was), you can only relive it with crappy video tapes.

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Add me to the long list of Carmen Sandiego fans. I played the original game back in the 80s, which helped feed a love of geography I still have today.

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Meh fwiw on some level a vector for milking as much cash as possible out of an idea is all any of these franchises ever were and all they ever will be though so :woman_shrugging:

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Yah, but we had text file copies of those from BBSes. Also, honestly you could just figure it out anyway.

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Mathnet! Sure it was campy. But it was also fun.

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I have fond memories of the game and the show.

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with lynne thigpen. who also was the dj in the warriors!

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I’m way to old to be a true fan but I am a PBS fan. I remember thinking back when shows like “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” came out; If they had shows like this back when I was a kid I could’ve gone to Harvard! PBS in the afternoons was almost better than saturday morning cartoons.

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Sneaky of them, making you look things up!

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I am pleased to see that the Google Earth version of Carmen Sandiego still seems to be up. Not that I really have time or interest in playing it these days; I had quite enough of that in my youth.

I’ve read some accounts suggesting that the old “Where on Earth” cartoon had surprising character depth for a show of its kind, but I never got into it myself.

Anyway, there’s at least one contestant on the game show who has told his story a couple of times.

If anyone’s wondering, the image in question is a subtle edit of a drawing of DC’s Madame Mirage, by one Kenneth Rocafort. (I remember the last time that image turned up.)

Aye, that’s probably why later Carmen Sandiego games did require you to look up a particular word on a particular page.

It was rather clever that some versions of Where in the World did require you to look up a particular item in the “The World Almanac and Book of Facts”, as it was called, but on the other hand I recall the book being very poorly-organized and of questionable utility as a reference.

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That’s called “off disk protection” and it’s easily defeated in cracks.

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While I had a few photocopied manuals in my day for this very reason, my favorite version of this was the age-verification system in Leisure Suit Larry, which asked you questions only an older person should know the answer to.

Cue calls down the stairs of “Mom, who was implicated in Watergate?” “Nixon, honey. Why?” “Oh, um. No reason.”

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Carmen sandiego was probably my favourite C64 game. I played it to death. I learned about geography while feeling like a super-sleuth.

The PBS TV show was an absolute cult hit in my tweenage years. I watched it religiously, and developed a love for intelligent gameshows, geography (again!), and acapella (thanks, Rockapella) as a result.

The netflix version of CS has been one of my guilty pleasures. Well-written, fun, and a great way for me to unwind when I’m not, you know, fighting the good fight to keep BB alive (or free of forum malcontents, as the case may be).

CS is one of the few constants for me throughout my gaming life, and I’m absolutely certain I am not the only one.

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