From Brøderbund to The Learning Company: the CD-ROM years

CD-ROM becomes the format

The move to CD-ROM began with the Deluxe Edition of the World game in 1992. Brøderbund gave Where in the U.S.A. the same treatment around the same time, releasing its own Deluxe CD-ROM edition for MS-DOS in the early 1990s. Both moved the series off floppy disks for good, trading disk-swapping for the larger storage a CD-ROM allowed — room enough for digitised photography and recorded music that the floppy releases never had.

The 1998 sale

Brøderbund itself changed hands during this period. On June 21, 1998, Brøderbund and The Learning Company signed a merger agreement; the deal closed on August 31, 1998, with Brøderbund shareholders receiving 0.80 shares of Learning Company stock for each Brøderbund share — roughly 16.85 million shares in total, valuing the acquisition at approximately $420 million. The Learning Company itself was a relatively young name at that point: it had been SoftKey International until 1996, when SoftKey renamed itself after acquiring the original, unrelated Learning Company for around $607 million in 1995.

What that meant for Carmen Sandiego

After 1998, new packaging and reissues of the Carmen Sandiego line carried The Learning Company's branding rather than Brøderbund's. Treasures of Knowledge (2001), developed by ImageBuilder Software, is the clearest example — it shipped under The Learning Company label rather than Brøderbund's own. The Learning Company itself went through further changes shortly after: Mattel bought the combined company in 1999, in a deal reported at $3.6 billion, and later divested it, which is part of why ownership of the classic Carmen Sandiego titles can be hard to trace precisely today.