The World in Pictures: Deluxe's photographs and music
Where the Deluxe Edition's location photographs and folk recordings came from, and which release carried what.
The Deluxe Edition sold itself on pictures. The original floppy box promises “spectacular photos from the National Geographic Society” and a “movie-like musical score and realistic digitized sound,” and a sticky note on the same panel counts 20 villains, 45 countries, 62 animations and 16 maps, with The World Almanac & Book of Facts included “to help decipher 2500-plus clues.”
The World in Pictures
The manual (copyright 1990 and 1992) credits the photographs country by country under the heading “The World in Pictures,” and the roll reads like a National Geographic masthead. Thomas J. Abercrombie shot Afghanistan, Luis Marden Peru, Jodi Cobb the United Kingdom and Dean Conger the USSR; James L. Stanfield covers five countries on his own: China, Cuba, Israel, Pakistan and Poland. ACME’s home city gets a credit too, a Golden Gate Bridge picture by James L. Amos. Other frames came from The Image Bank and Magnum Photos rather than the Society. The list still files pictures under the USSR and Kampuchea, a reminder that the photo desk closed before the map stopped moving.
The music credits
The same credits name Jonelle Adkisson for original music and give “Folk and Traditional Music” to Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings. The manual also tells players how to read the licensing details in the game itself: “To learn more about the licensed material in the product type SOURCE,” which brings up information on the music and photographs. The floppy box, for its part, advertises a score and digitised sound and says nothing about Folkways.
Floppy, then CD-ROM
The manual counts 45 locations in the standard version and 60 on the CD-ROM. When Computer Gaming World covered the CD release in April 1994 (MPC and Macintosh, $60), it listed the enhancements as “digitized photos from the National Geographic Society, music from the Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings, and The World Almanac & Book of Facts,” and said the disc “adds substantial value to an already excellent game.” Programming credits go to Lance Groody and Barbara Webster for the original, Louis Ewens for the CD-ROM, and Sean Hill and Tim Keanini for the Macintosh.
About that Folkways playlist
Smithsonian Folkways publishes a 160-track playlist called “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” (2013, catalogue FPL10046), and it is easy to take for this game’s soundtrack. Folkways’ own description says otherwise: it is “a complete collection of the music approved for use in the 1996 game release,” the later rebuild of the World game. Use it as a guide to that edition. For Deluxe, the manual’s one-line credit is as far as the record goes.