In the 1990s Carmen Sandiego had her own game show as well as cartoon
From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett (opens in new tab) wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, a woman who sneaks around the world from Kiev to Carolina—but it's her early TV appearances we'll be taking a comically oversized magnifying glass to.
The problem with the word obscure is that it's so subjective. If you know of a thing, chances are you won't consider it obscure. When I cover games from the '80s, other people who were around at the time will merely consider them retro, while to people who weren't born yet, the idea that people could actually play games whose only colours were cyan and magenta can seem like insanity.
Today, if you grew up or took holidays to the US, you may well think «Well, yes, obviously that existed.» To that I can only point to your people's reactions when they saw Knightmare(opens in new tab) for the first time. Smugly, because we had Knightmare and you did not. But you know what we didn't have? The cheapest ever attempt to turn a computer game into a TV show. With the possible exception of Maniac Mansion, of course.
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was an edutainment game with the focus on—What? I'm forgetting something? Oops, sorry. It's been a while since I used the «e» word. Give me a second here, I just need to check the media library. Let's see. Giant ant monster… bikini karate babe… tongue of the Fat-Man… where is it? Ah, yes, here we go. Sorry for the delay. *Blows dust off image.*
Where was I? Oh, yes. The first game was intended to teach kids geography, and in a pretty good way. You work for the ACME Detective Agency, armed only with a physical World Almanac full of information and a lack of anything more
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