The suspects of Where in the U.S.A. (1986)

Where in the U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego? (1986) built its own suspect pool for the fifty-state chase, separate from the international roster of the original game. It was the first sequel in the series, and it kept the trait-and-warrant loop intact while swapping an entirely new set of crooks in for the World game’s cast.

The sixteen

The documented roster of henchmen — the crooks a detective works through before a case is ever assigned against Carmen — is:

• Sven Galli
• Gypsy Rose Lasagna
• B.B.D. O’Brien
• Sheriff Paul Drive
• Ken Hartley Reed
• Titus Canby
• Mylar Naugahyde
• Brenda Vanderbilt and Cobina Vanderbilt (twin sisters)
• Karl La Fong
• Polly Esther Fabrique
• Heidi Gosikh
• Venus H. Pencil
• Wendy Pauper
• Alexander Graham Edison
• Benjamin Hana

What isn’t documented

Unlike the 1985 original and its Deluxe remake, no surviving scan of the 1986 U.S.A. manual’s individual crime files — the hair colour, hobby, food and vehicle recorded for each of the sixteen — has turned up for this entry. The names above are as documented; their traits and back-stories are not, and are left out here rather than guessed at. A few read as plays on words even without a bio to confirm it — Polly Esther Fabrique and Sheriff Paul Drive among them — in keeping with the series’ habit of punning suspect names, but nothing beyond the name itself is documented here. That gap is worth stating plainly rather than papering over: a wrong guess at a crook’s job or hair colour is worse than admitting the record is incomplete.

The rest of the case

The mechanics carried over from the original: witnesses hand out destination and suspect-trait clues, and the player files an Interpol warrant before making an arrest, with state nicknames, capitals and landmarks standing in for the flags and currencies of the 1985 game. The screen layout followed the same pattern too, split into sections for the day, time and current location, a block of local text, an image of the city, and the player’s list of available actions. The game shipped with a copy of Fodor’s USA as its reference guide — reaching each new rank required typing in a specific word from a designated page of the guide — and a detective could climb from Gumshoe up through Junior Investigator, Detective and Master Detective to Super Sleuth before being trusted with a case against Carmen herself.