Nick Brunch
The hard-boiled ex-private eye chasing Sam Spade's shadow across two Carmen Sandiego games.
Nick Brunch is a V.I.L.E. henchman built entirely out of detective-fiction cliché: a “hard-boiled ex-private eye” who, per his own dossier, “tries to emulate Sam Spade but is more like an ordinary shovel.” The only things that interest him are fast cars and faster women, and he’ll never turn down a caper that lets him live in the fast lane. The joke is pointed: a game about a detective agency chasing a gang of thieves gives that gang its own washed-up detective, a private eye who switched sides.
On the road
An avid mountain climber, Brunch was last seen roaring through an Alpine village on his Kamikaze-1250 motorcycle. He wears a snap-brimmed fedora and always carries a soiled trenchcoat draped over his shoulder regardless of the weather, and sports a Dick Tracy Crimefighter’s ring on his left hand. He and fellow crook Scar Graynolt are close friends who share a common interest in Mexican food.
A continuity slip
Brunch is a good example of how much (and how little) changed when Brøderbund carried a character from the 1985 original into the 1990 Deluxe Edition: his biography reads almost word for word the same in both manuals, right down to the seedy moustache — except that his eyes are recorded as brown in the 1985 printing and green in the Deluxe one, a small inconsistency between the two editions’ dossiers.
In the games
Nick Brunch is part of the ten-suspect pool in Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1985) and reappears among the twenty villains of the Deluxe Edition, listed with black hair and a motorcycle as his getaway vehicle.
Dressed for the part
The costume is doing a lot of the joke’s work: trenchcoat, snap-brim fedora, and — per his dossier — a “Dick Tracy Crimefighter’s ring” worn on his left hand, on a crook who spends his dossier failing to live up to any of it. Brunch wants to look like a detective far more than he actually manages to catch anyone.
The Mexican-food crowd
Brunch’s dossier is one of several in the roster that quietly cross-reference each other: he shares his taste for Mexican food with both Scar Graynolt, named outright as his close friend, and with Lady Agatha Wayland, who drives the countryside “looking for great Mexican restaurants” in her own dossier. It is a small, deliberate detail — proof the writers thought of the roster as a hangout with its own running jokes, not just a list of names to plug into a warrant. Read the three dossiers together and the ten-suspect pool starts to look less like a random line-up and more like a cast of regulars who all know each other.