Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Educational games are usually either boring or too primitive. Children turn up their noses in the direction of big games, as soon as they realize what's what, and do not rely on the choice of adults. Exceptions, like the Oregon Trail (by the way, the oldest fossil), make up a fraction, the rest is that, according to the marketing team, children are interested: consider up to ten with Mario, Russian with smeshariki, hymnal with Masha and bears. And if some funds are allocated to the same kinolitsenziyam, then the flowers of life are watered with those that scraped the bottom of the barrel ...

But Where is the World is Carmen Sandiego? it does not bet on accessibility for children, although it is not prohibitively complex, and not on the teaching factor, although it is present, but on successful mechanics, combining these and other things that they carried in a little modified form in almost 30 years. How many games can be called with original ideas that survived so many reincarnations?

Can I describe WitWiCS? (I’ll confine myself to just CS, okay?) as a partially board game with detective elements. The world of crime, led by Carmen Sandiego, is eager for valuable artifacts that lie on the shelves of museums around the world. Every week something will disappear: either the emperor's sword is whistled in Japan, or the memorable coconut is pulled somewhere in Oceania. The order for catching an intruder goes straight to Interpol, and from there - straight to your hands.

But by that moment his trace was gone, and first we need to understand where he went, and here the whole globe is at disposal. Well, almost - in the game only 30 cities. Arriving at the crime scene with a notebook at the ready, according to the protocol, eyewitnesses should be interrogated about suspicious persons. Visiting the bank, you can find out what currency they exchanged, in the library - which books they studied, in the harbor - on the ship under what flag they sailed, on the stock exchange - they were interested in buying something. But all these facts - and they are chosen randomly, as well as the order of their presentation, and the set each time - may not be enough if the investigator has white spots in geographical knowledge. Of course, Wikipedia, Google or, at worst, the world atlas are helpful and cheat at the same time in such a test of knowledge, but the constant use of reference materials is unlikely to bring pleasure from the game.

The second element is to obtain information about the criminals themselves, collecting signs from eyewitness accounts and entering them into the Interpol search terminal. Sketching a fairly detailed "portrait" and reducing the list of suspects to one, the chief issues a warrant for his or her arrest. An extra hassle adds the fact that every quest in CS is limited in time, and you need to make several hot-track flights to catch the fugitive plunderers of museums and other cultural institutions. The clock is ticking during other activities as well: interviews of eyewitnesses, visits to the Interpol computer center, and the character needs to sleep soundly, and 8 hours a day are set aside for this.

Of course, not everything is necessarily difficult - from each city flights are sent only to 3-4 destinations, which are shown on the map, and you can guess that, say, in South America and Japan do not use francs, you can use the exception method. Here, the difficulty falls into the hands of a random number generator, which may ask, and where the Chinese live, and what country is known for its goat breeding. But this coincidence provides the game with almost legendary replayability.

By sending thieves to thieves, Interpol will raise the player in rank and gradually complicate your tasks, until finally he doesn’t hunt for the leader of this criminal organization, Carmen Sandiego, the fatal lady in a red cloak.

To say that all of the above has ensured popularity and a comfortable existence - to say nothing. In addition to several reprints, there were variations on the theme of time travel, space, and even North Dakota (allegedly one of the US states). In the future, they were overgrown with new elements and supplemented with a large number of cities, suspects and clues, but the basic idea remained the same. Moreover, one of the latest reincarnations is available on Facebook and on mobile phones. Not to mention the fabulous profits that the game brought to the publishers of geographical atlases and encyclopedias. Uff ... But this is not all - based on a computer game there was also its popular teen game show, which has lived on television for several years.

And if all this does not convince you at least one eye to look at CS, then the geographer of you is useless.