Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition

Where in the World Deluxe Edition: the original in colour and sound

The Deluxe Edition is Brøderbund's full remake of the 1985 classic, rebuilt for VGA machines and, before long, CD-ROM. The detective loop is untouched. Almost everything around it was torn out and rebuilt bigger. For a lot of players in the early 1990s, this was their first Carmen — encountered in photographs and music rather than the beeps and blocks of the mid-'80s.

What's new in the World Deluxe Edition

Set beside the floppy original, Deluxe piles it on:

• VGA graphics and a reworked, animated interface.
• A bigger world: 45 countries, sixteen maps, sixty-two animations, twenty villains and more than 2,500 clues on the 1990 floppy box.
• On the CD-ROM edition, the one played here: 60 countries, photographs from the National Geographic Society, folk and traditional music from Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings, and more than five hundred spoken foreign-language clues.
• Three ways to dig at each stop — question a bystander, search the scene, or call Crime Net.

The 1985 game underneath the Deluxe Edition

Strip the paint and it's the 1985 design exactly: chase a V.I.L.E. crook city to city, read destination and trait clues, file the warrant, work the ranks toward Carmen. One word of warning for collectors: a separate, earlier “Enhanced” reissue is a different release from this “Deluxe” one, and the two are easy to mix up. We sort them out in 1985 vs Deluxe Edition. A Windows version continued the line in 1994.

Play Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition online in your browser

Where in the World 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 CD-ROM edition, 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.