Guide 16 · Sleuth
Crack your first case in America's Past
≈ 2 min readForty-five destinations, three ways to question a scene, and the ZOOM feature nobody else in the series has.
Where in America's Past Is Carmen Sandiego? (Brøderbund, 1991) turns the time-travel formula on U.S. history. The manual spells the grid out exactly: five geographic regions, West, Midwest, East, Southwest and South, crossed with nine twenty-five-year time periods running from before 1800 to the present, forty-five destinations in all. The bundled reference is What Happened When: A Chronology of Life & Events in America.
01
Read the brief for treasure, place and gender
The chief's briefing states what was stolen, where it was taken from, and whether the culprit is male or female, then starts the Time Remaining Indicator counting down toward zero. There's no separate day count to track, just watch that indicator.
02
Plot the jump on the Destination Map and Timeline
Press MAP to open the Destination Map and Timeline, pick a region, then a twenty-five-year increment, then LAUNCH on the Chronoskimmer 450SL. The ZOOM function lets you inspect individual states within a region, including the date each one was admitted to the union, useful when a clue turns on statehood itself.
03
Work all three investigation commands
Each stop offers Ask Bystander, Consult Source, and Listen In. All three can turn up a lead toward the crook's next region and era, so work through them rather than assuming the first answer is the whole picture.
04
Cross-reference with What Happened When
The manual reminds you directly: use What Happened When to help solve a clue, the book has too much in it to memorize, so treat it as a lookup tool for the exact event or figure a clue names, not something to read cover to cover.
05
Let the Evidence Database run against all sixteen dossiers
Logged clues feed the Evidence Database; press COMPUTE and it checks your entries against all sixteen V.I.L.E. dossiers. One match issues the warrant, arriving without it lets the suspect go and draws HQ's disapproval, arresting the wrong person is worse.
06
Climb from Greenhorn toward SuperScout
You start as a Greenhorn and advance through Tenderfoot, Jr. Birddogger, Birddogger, Jr. Tracker, Tracker and Scout on the way to SuperScout. Solving all eighty cases and reaching SuperScout earns Hall of Fame induction, a long grind by design.