Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Junior Detective Edition

Junior Detective Edition: Carmen for the read-along set

By the mid-1990s the series had a problem any teacher could spot: it was built for kids who could already read. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Junior Detective Edition (1995) is Brøderbund's answer — the globe-chase rebuilt from the ground up for ages five to eight, including children who haven't learned to read yet. The CD-ROM made it possible: every clue is a picture or a spoken line, never a paragraph.

Detective work without words in Junior Detective

You still work for ACME and chase V.I.L.E., helped along by Zack and Ivy from the Fox cartoon and Stretch, ACME's crime-tracking dog. The whole thing runs through a chatty talking gadget, the GizmoTapper 586LC, whose built-in helper, Dee Jaye (voiced by Leilani Jones), smiles at you as a red bar on the control panel. The play is all pictures:

• You sweep a magnifying-glass cursor across a country scene; it glows when it's over a clue, and you click to reveal it.
• Each clue is a simple icon — coffee, a cathedral, a snake, gold — standing for something about the next country.
• You match those icons against the pictures on a map to work out where the crook ran. Early cases need one or two; later ones want three or four.
• A photographer at each stop snaps a piece of the crook's face, and the bits assemble into a wanted poster.

The GizmoTapper battery instead of a clock

There's no case clock here. Instead the GizmoTapper runs on a battery, and travelling, hunting clues and building the poster all drain it — make the arrest before the power dies. There are 14 cases in all, and if you blow one, the crook escapes at the end, same as the grown-up games.

Junior Detective Edition: the verdict from the field

It picked up a 1995 Codie Award for Best Early Education Program and a 1996 Newsweek Editor's Choice, and it remains a genuinely gentle on-ramp to the series for very young players. Rita Moreno voices Carmen, as she did on the Fox cartoon, and there is a ladder of eight ranks to climb, Rookie to Super Sleuth. It shipped on a Windows and Mac CD-ROM; the copy here is the Windows version, running in Windows 3.1 in the browser.

Play Carmen Sandiego: Junior Detective Edition (1995) online in your browser

Carmen Sandiego: Junior Detective Edition runs right here in your web browser, free, with nothing to download or install. The copy here is the Windows version. The page starts Windows 3.1 first, and Windows starts the game on its own. Click inside the picture to capture the mouse, and press Esc when you want your pointer back.

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.