Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? 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

Set beside the floppy original, Deluxe piles it on:

• VGA graphics and a reworked, animated interface.
• Digitised photographs sourced from National Geographic, and music drawn from Smithsonian Folkways recordings — real places, real sound.
• The first spoken dialogue in the series.
• A far larger world: roughly 60 countries, sixteen maps, twenty villains, and over 3,200 clues.
• Three ways to dig at each stop — question a bystander, search the scene, or call Crime Net.

Same game underneath

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.