The 1996 V.I.L.E. gang: thirty-nine crooks and Carmen
Forty pun-named suspects with no dossiers behind them, plus a cat and two janitors working Carmen's side of the street.
The 1996 game dropped the dossier, so its crooks never get biographies. They do get names, and the game keeps them in one string table: forty entries, in two alphabetical runs of 20 and 19, then Carmen Sandiego. That squares with the box's promise of “40 challenging cases”. The 1999 game notes reprint the list as a checklist for tracking your arrests.
The roster
- Anita Bath
- Art Schrival
- Auntie Matter
- Barb Dwyer
- Barry Koodah
- Buzz “Ted” Loose
- Dee Pockets
- Dinah Myte
- Don N. Hout
- Flo N. Eddy
- Hal E. Tosis
- Harry Bacque
- Herb Aside
- Indy Slammer
- Ivana Steele
- Jack Cheez
- Jerri Riggs
- Jonah Fark
- Kay Serrah-Serrah
- Ken U. Sparadigm
- Leia D. Land
- Les Cash
- Lisa Carr
- Lou Pole
- M. T. Pockets
- “Mac” R. Roni
- May K. Deal
- Meg Maidey
- Mel Function
- Miss Ann Stuf
- Olive Yermunny
- Penny Pincher
- Phil O. Dendron
- Rob M. Blind
- Ruth Less
- “Shaky” Al LeBye
- Skip N. Skule
- Stu L. Pidjin
- Tsu Mi
- Carmen Sandiego, case forty
One spelling wobbles: the game data has Olive Yermunny where the 1999 notes print “Olive Yermun”. Every name is built to be read aloud, which is the house style covered in the pun names of V.I.L.E. Apart from Carmen, none of them appears among the Deluxe Edition's twenty.
Identifying a crook without a file
With no dossier, a crook comes down to five facts: gender, hair colour, height, weight, and a hat, camera, watch or glasses. The writers got a lot of mileage out of that short menu. One scrap reassures a short henchman: “You're in luck, my diminutive minion. ACME is apparently looking right over your head.” Another, signed “C.S.”, praises reconnaissance photos as “picture perfect”. The same data file holds a set of rhyming couplets that riff on watches, hats, cameras and sunglasses (“I never wear a watch because / It's always time for theft.”). The notes describe Carmen herself, when she isn't in disguise, by her long brown hair, red trench coat and fedora.
Carmen's support staff
- Carmine, Carmen's cat. The notes call her a “purloining pussycat” whose criminal mind dates from “an unfortunate incident involving an economy-sized sack of kitty litter”; Carmen trained her to tail the clumsier henchpeople and hiss off pursuing gumshoes. Spotting her means you picked the right country.
- Rick and Nick ICK, the ICK Brothers, “jellybrained janitors” fired from every cleaning job they ever held and hired to tidy up after V.I.L.E. Run into them and you're closing in. One scrap is their apology to a crook: “Sorry about the hole we poked in your hat! Luckily, it doesn't look like rain.”
- RoboCrook, “Carmen Sandiego's right-hand man...um...robot”. Brøderbund's 1996 launch release put him in the companion Where in the USA game; in World he turns up in the 1998 v3.5, as the prize for filling the language-quiz ultrabar.