The Minot committee: how North Dakota commissioned a Carmen game

Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? started at a teacher’s desk. Bonny Berryman taught eighth-grade social studies at Erik Ramstad Junior High in Minot, and her son Brett was hooked on the Carmen disks. His verdict, as the Video Game History Foundation tells it: “We should have one of these on North Dakota, Mom.”

From pipe dream to grant

Berryman took the idea to Craig Nansen, computer coordinator for Minot Public Schools, who first filed it as a “pipe dream or pie-in-the-sky idea.” He came round, sounded out Brøderbund, and sent a proposal to the state Department of Public Instruction, which passed it to the legislature. In March 1987 the legislature granted $100,000, and the plan included an initial batch of 2,500 copies for the state to distribute to teachers. A year later Classroom Computer Learning (March 1988) was already asking the obvious question in a headline: “Carmen Sandiego in North Dakota?! Where Next?”

Division of labour

Nansen assembled the North Dakota Database Committee, thirteen teachers plus himself, with Mary Littler as co-chair. The teachers supplied the content: they invented the pranks, chose the locations, researched the clues, wrote the classroom material and created the imposters. Brøderbund took that work and built it on the interface and structure of its earlier Apple II Carmen games, adding graphics, the user manual and retail packaging. The preserved Apple II copy credits Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott for design, Ken Bull (also credited on the Apple II Where in Europe) for programming, Katherine Bird and Janese Freed as managers, and Louis Ewens for music. Brøderbund also donated a copy of The Print Shop, which the teachers used for posters, workshop handouts and their home-made almanac.

Naming the imposters

The gang were teachers in disguise, and many of the pseudonyms doubled as nods to state history. Nansen became C. R. Parks, after attractions such as Theodore Roosevelt National Park. A middle-school social studies teacher created L. E. Vader, for the elevator you ride to the top of the state capitol. A fourth-grade teacher became Rich R. Dirt after colleagues vetoed her first choice, “Rich Chernozem,” as too obscure; chernozem is the rich soil of the state’s east.

Release, and the bill

A Minot schools newsletter in January 1988 had promised statewide distribution that summer. The official release came on February 23, 1989, ahead of the centennial that November. Districts received copies through the Department of Public Instruction once they had sent at least one educator to one of Nansen’s seminars; the public could order from Brøderbund Software-Direct at $34.95, with teacher’s guides at $10. The committee aimed it at fourth graders and demonstrated it at Minot’s Dakota Square Mall on March 18, 1989.

Beyond the state line it barely moved. Brøderbund co-founder Doug Carlston recalled retail sales never getting past single digits, and he deemed the experiment behind it a failure. The pitch, as he recalled staff putting it, had been simple: “We basically have it down to an engine, just with a set of data we can [use to] make a whole new product.” How the game was then lost and found again is told in The North Dakota rediscovery.