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 On 07/29/2020 at 06:46 AM by Matt Snee See More From This User » |
"Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?" was an adventure/educational game released for computers in 1989. The player is tasked with traveling through time to capture the illustrious thief Carmen Sandiego or her henchmen as they attempt to steal famous historical artifacts. The player is given clues to Carmen's location in time, and has to choose when/where to go to catch her.
What's pretty interesting about the game is it came with a huge, single-volume desk encyclopedia for you to look up historical facts in order to find Carmen in the game. Believe it or not, after all these years, I still have that encyclopedia. It was a lot of fun to look up factoids in it while playing the game, and sometimes I would just page through the encyclopedia for fun to learn stuff. I was big into encyclopedias when I was a kid. Still am.
Carmen Sandiego has had quite a career since this game came out, and there have been other games and TV shows and cartoons featuring the famous thief.
For a while I was really into this game. It was fun.
I never got into the games, but I watched a couple of the TV shows as a kid. They had a Saturday morning cartoon that actually wasn't that bad. And PBS had a live action game show where real kids answered questions on geography and history. And the game show had one of the catchiest theme songs ever! I can still remember it.
I heard that they're making a new cartoon where Carmen San Diego's actually the hero? Wiat...what?
"Hit it Rockapella!"
You beat me to it!
Ha. I love Rockapella.
I think I might have watched the old cartoon too. And I've heard of the new show. Well, it's not like Carmen Sandiego is really THAT evil or anything. 
PBS Kids for the win.
you know, I never saw that show. Didn't even know about it until I looked it up for this blog.
Are you an encyclopedia nerd too? I thought I was the only one until I read that Alexander Graham Bell use to read them for new inventing ideas. Now there are three of us!
But seriously, I love fact books and TIme/LIfe history summary books and stuff like that.
I watched the TV show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego a bit in the 90s. I totally dig the Rockapella segments. I never played the games, but I always want to when I see one of them pop up on the lists I'm frequently scanning. Where's the games encylopedia by the way?
yeah, when I was a kid before the internet I had a couple of sets. Some were from my grandfather and those were really old. In fact, the first books I remember truly loving were the Peanuts encyclopedias, which were kids' encyclopedias featuring Snoopy and Charlie Brown, etc.
I do fall down Wikipedia holes sometimes, and have the app on my iPad.
Another thing is when I was really into star wars about 2005, I used to spend a lot of time on the online star wars encylopedia, which was called, of course, Wookiepedia. I imagine it's still online.
That Snoopy one sounds great.
Funny, I keep forgetting that wiki is kind of like an encylopedia. I practically live on that site.
I've probably looked at Wookiepedia a few times too. It comes up in searches I make.
I, too, am an encyclopedia nerd. I also miss the old card catalogs in libraries.
I played both Where in the World and Where in Time and had a lot of fun wth them.
you might like this book by Nicholson Baker. It's about the fight to get libraries to keep their card catalogs and newspaper archives, both of which they've been destroying.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375726217/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_sUIiFbQ9F0YV1
My library does some digitizing projects with local newspapers that don't normally get scanned. And there's always digital versions of the major newspapers they have on paper, but once they've been around a while, they get recycled. I think it's just a storage thing. I can't think of where we'd keep them in my library, and I'm in a big library too. I'm going to have to ask someone about this. I'm curious now. I want to know where everything goes in my library.
As for card catalogs. I'm not sure why anyone would want those anymore since you can search on computer or phone whereever you are. Don't get me wrong, I'm nostalgic as heck about those things too. I get the warm a fuzzies whenever I see an old card catalog cabinet, but it's like punch cards for computers; no one's going back to those except in this video game I played recently. And now I mention it, I wonder if I've see a card catalog in a game. I'm going to keep my eyes out for that.
I think Baker's argument is that newspapers (especially small, local ones that are not as saved as much as like the NYTimes) are historical documents, and though it might be far-fetched, digital files can be manipulated. Historians are going to be looking at these newspapers when they catalog what went on. But I also understand that it takes space and money to keep them, and they're also harder to access than digital files, and aren't searchable. Ideally, we'd have both.
Card catalogs are definitely antiquated, but I feel nostalgic for them myself sometimes. Funny how quick the world changed.
One of the reference librarians I know is doing some archival work on local newspapers. I not sure exactly what she does, but I think she's scanning them. I'm sure there's a way to make the digital copies safer from tampering. I love the idea of archiving and would love to do it myself.
There is apparently a fan-game in the early 90s called Where the Hell is Carmen Sandiego? You had to track Carmen in hell, using knowledge of Dante's Inferno.
And the only state they used for a state-specific Carmen Sandiego was North Dakota, of all places. The only places I can think of off the top my head in ND are Bismarck, Fargo, Minot, and Williston.
Whoa! I like that Dante/Carmen mashup.
That's more places than I could think of! :)
That's crazy. I would definitely play that.
Dang it they snuck learning into a fun game. That's crazy 
I never watched the Carmen Sandiego shows but this game sounds like a lot of fun. It would be perfect for the Switch.
Don't you hate that?
Yeah, a Switch game sounds like a perfect match.
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