Portwood, Elliott & Bigham: the people behind the case

Around 1983, Brøderbund programmer Dane Bigham wanted to take the idea behind text adventures like Colossal Cave Adventure and rebuild it as a menu-driven game for the Apple II, framed around a cops-and-robbers chase. He brought in designer-artists Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott, plus scriptwriter David Siefkin, to shape the idea into what became Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1985).

Three very different résumés

Gene Portwood (1934–2000) joined Disney straight out of school in 1950 and animated on Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty, and for five years drew Jiminy Cricket for the studio's weekly TV program. He left animation for a run of day jobs — at Security National Bank, Honeywell, and UC Berkeley — before landing at Brøderbund around 1980, where he became the Carmen Sandiego project's programming manager and artist. Lauren Elliott, a grandson of Hall Roosevelt (Eleanor Roosevelt's brother), studied architecture at the University of Colorado Boulder and environmental design under landscape architect Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1983 he walked into Brøderbund's San Rafael office with a sketchpad of game pitches and talked his way into a job. Both had already served as project managers on Will Wright's first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), before working on Carmen Sandiego.

How the idea came together

Brøderbund co-founder Gary Carlston had wanted to build a game around geography since childhood, playing almanac-based games with his brother Doug; an early working title was reportedly Six Crowns of Henry VIII, focused on Britain, before the scope widened to the whole world. Siefkin wrote the first script and coined the character's name before leaving the project to join the U.S. State Department as a diplomat. Elliott has said Portwood deserves the credit for the character concept itself, on the reasoning that a female mastermind worked because “girls [could] be just as bad” as any male villain. Bigham built the underlying clue-and-suspect database engine and pushed back on marketing the game as “educational,” preferring to call it “exploration.” He left Brøderbund before the game became a hit and did not work on any of the sequels.

After Carmen

Elliott and Portwood stayed at Brøderbund together for over a decade; Elliott alone is credited with more than twenty Brøderbund titles across thirteen years there. In 1996 the pair left to found Elliott Portwood Productions, doing contract design work for Maxis, Electronic Arts, The Learning Company and others, including Widget Workshop: The Mad Scientist's Laboratory (1995) and The Incredible Adventures of Aristotle McGuffin. Portwood retired the same year the studio was founded and died in 2000; Elliott later founded the internet gaming company Dream Zero. Bigham went on to design and program for Sega, Hudson Soft and Irem, including later entries in the Lode Runner series.