Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?

One whole game about one state

Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? is the strangest, rarest entry in the entire catalogue, and the only one set inside a single U.S. state. It exists because a group of schoolteachers in Minot decided their state's most famous thief ought to visit North Dakota — and then actually pulled it off.

The driving force was Craig Nansen, a technology coordinator with Minot Public Schools, who in March 1987 secured a $100,000 grant from the state legislature. A volunteer panel of educators, the North Dakota Database Committee, wrote the content; Brøderbund ran it through the existing Apple II Carmen engine and pressed the boxes. The whole thing was timed to land for North Dakota's statehood centennial in 1989, and it was released that February.

Prairie detective work

Underneath the local colour it's a true-blue Carmen game, with a few wonderful tweaks for its setting. You work out of the in-fiction NoDak Detective Agency, chasing one of 16 pun-named gang members across 38 locations around the state, with over 1,000 factual clues and some 50 real North Dakotans to learn along the way. The language is softened for the classroom: "criminals" are imposters, "crimes" are pranks. Carmen herself only turns up at the final level.

And because you can't exactly fly between Bismarck and Bowman, the airport is a gas station and the airplane is a four-wheel-drive truck. You still get six days to read the clues, fill out a correct warrant, and make the arrest stick.

Lost, then found

Roughly 5,000 copies sold, almost entirely to schools in the region. The boxes were used, outgrown and thrown out; the title never reached normal retail; and for years it survived mostly as a rumour. Today only three retail copies are known to exist. It was missing even from the donated Brøderbund archive at The Strong — which is how Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation noticed the hole and went looking, tracking down the teachers and recovering a box of original development materials, including the committee's hand-made Carmen's North Dakota Almanac. The game was digitised and preserved. For the full story see The North Dakota rediscovery.

Why it's worth knowing

It was meant as a pilot — prove the regional idea here, then roll it out state by state. No other state edition ever followed; commercial quotes ran into the millions, and nobody else had Minot's grant or its volunteers. That makes North Dakota a one-off: part educational software, part civic art project, and one of the great preservation stories in games. Note that this is an Apple II title, so it sits in the archive as a case file rather than a browser-playable bundle.