Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition

Where in the U.S.A. Deluxe Edition: a remake, not a repaint

The Deluxe Edition of Where in the U.S.A. kept the job description and changed nearly everything else. There is a new V.I.L.E. gang of fifteen plus Carmen, a pun roster that runs from Kareem Carmel and Freda D. Darke through Polly Graph, Hal E. Luya and Hammond Swiss to Ray Zarumpus. There is a new route as well, fifty-one stops with one city for each state plus Washington, D.C., and it does not repeat the 1986 list: Birmingham stands in for Alabama where Montgomery used to, Juneau for Alaska instead of Anchorage, Sacramento for California instead of San Francisco.

The wrist computer in U.S.A. Deluxe

The screen is built around a communicator panel. Travel calls up Employee Travel and its map of flights, Crime Net is a call away at every stop, and Warrant files the paperwork. The case arrives as a file from the Chief with your agent name, your rank, a deadline and the loot (on one case, the Bitterroot Mountains). Evidence comes in as typed reports with boxes for Dusted, Cataloged, Stored and Misplaced; one is an answering machine on which a sultry voice says “Meet me where Lewis and Clark met Sacajawea.” Witnesses talk in speech bubbles, like the clown who says the suspect asked about the northernmost state in the Great Plains. Carmen's own dossier notes that she is on a fad diet to lose 1.35 pounds.

Photographs and fifty states of music in U.S.A. Deluxe

Each state gets two captioned photographs and a relief map. The photographs are licensed stock, most of them from The Image Bank, with more from Stock South, FPG and SuperStock. The music is the surprise. The disc pairs every state with recordings licensed from folk, blues and roots labels, Arhoolie, Rounder, Canyon, Rebel, County and Philo among them: Robert Shaw's barrelhouse piano on “The Ma Grinder” and Flaco Jiménez's accordion for Texas, Ralph Stanley, Clifton Chenier, Hazel Dickens. There are 63 tracks for the 51 stops. A few were made at Brøderbund, staff composer Michael Barrett's “Surfin' USA Deluxe” among them. A separate Source Information program lets you browse the songs and pictures state by state, outside a case.

Which U.S.A. Deluxe disc this is

The Deluxe design dates from 1992. The game here is the MS-DOS CD-ROM, which names itself Deluxe CD-ROM v1.0 and has files dated October 1993. It needs a VGA card, and its setup offers Sound Blaster, Pro AudioSpectrum, Roland MT-32, AdLib and General MIDI. Brøderbund also sold the Deluxe on floppies, revised as version 2.0 in 1994, and moved it to Windows as the U.S.A. CD-ROM. The design team was Philip Bouchard, Claire Curtin, Ken Goldstein, Lance Groody, Leila Joslyn, Hilary Nation, Rod Nelsen, Tom Rettig and Kim Walls.

Play Where in the U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition online in your browser

Where in the U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition runs right here in your web browser, free, with nothing to download or install. The copy here is the MS-DOS Deluxe CD-ROM, version 1.0, with its disc in the emulator's CD drive.

Anything the game writes to its own disk, from your detective's rank to a saved case, is kept in this browser, and in your account too once you sign in. Press Play in browser at the top of this page to open the case.