Carmen Sandiego is a series of American educational mystery video games that spawned an edutainment franchise of the same name.

Each game of the series has a particular theme and subject, where the player must use their knowledge to find Carmen Sandiego or any of her innumerable henchmen.

[1] In 1983, the founders of Broderbund Software, Gary and Doug Carlston, publicly discussed a plan to make edutainment one of their company's three focus areas.

[2] The character of Carmen Sandiego was developed by David Siefkin, who drafted the first script of the game for Broderbund beside the Strawberry Canyon swimming pool of the University of California, Berkeley in 1984.

Siefkin combined the character's first and last names from the Brazilian singer and actress Carmen Miranda and the city of San Diego, California.

She was chosen for the title role by the early project manager Katherine Bird because her name suggested mystery and exoticism, as well as humor.

[3] The first game in the series released in 1985, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, was designed and written by Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott, and programmed by Dane Bigham.

This formula involves a series of missions in which the computer player tracks and apprehends each of Carmen Sandiego's underlings.

Immediately transported to the scene of the crime, the player must find clues to infer the suspect's next destination and to create an arrest warrant describing the guilty party's attributes.

The culprit travels through a series of different locations around the world in an attempt to shake off any pursuers, so the player will have to continue tracking the thief for some time.

On the final case, the perpetrator is revealed to be Carmen Sandiego herself, and the game ends when the player successfully captures her and is later inducted into the ACME Hall of Fame.

However, Great Chase Through Time completely abandoned the series' original formula and has the player spending each mission in one time period, where the goal is to create makeshift solutions to any historical problems that the theft has caused and find the thief whom Carmen Sandiego has dropped off.

The games created by Broderbund featured silly humor with a distinctive style of word play with extensive use of puns, rhymes, and alliteration.

This style of word play was also present, in varying degrees, in all three Carmen Sandiego television shows.

Clues about the suspect's next destination often used extended puns (example: "I pumped her for information, but her unrefined answer only suggested a crude plan to visit oil wells near Ahvaz") or rhyming couplets.

For example, a news report on massive blackouts from Carmen Sandiego Math Detective quotes an official as saying, "We're taking a dim view of the situation".

This was the first of the games to have a database built into the crime computer, where players could narrow down their next stop by entering information such as flag colors, currency used, and languages mentioned.

Production of the game was discontinued in 1990 due to the fall of the Eastern Bloc and drastic border and government changes that resulted.

In the game, Carmen Sandiego has invented KnowBots to steal knowledge and the player(s) have to try and thwart her plans.

The avatar, Cole, must maneuver through stages including a museum in New York City, the beaches of New Zealand, and Machu Picchu.

The player fights against Carmen's robots and spirits to prevent her from stealing an enchanted diamond, the repository of all the knowledge of the nations.

In 2019, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt licensed Carmen Sandiego to Global Eagle for them to make a trivia game to be played on airlines.

[14] This game sees the titular thief Carmen Sandiego and her VILE gang steal jewels from museums around the world and to try to find out the famous confession of Leonardo da Vinci's brother Ruperta.

Starting as an inexperienced rookie, the player's first quest is to retrieve the Napoleon bowl that was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris and apprehend the thief.

The game is scheduled for release in early 2025, initially on Netflix before being distributed on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation and Xbox.

Every class that completed four of six missions would have a chance to win a new computer loaded with The Learning Company educational software.

[23][24] The synopsis says: "As special agents of the ACME Detective Agency, kids will embark on missions to track down the devious Carmen Sandiego and her cohorts, collecting clues and learning about the world (and the Internet) to solve the case".

[27] In 2014, the Internet Archive began hosting an embedded DOSBox emulator running a copy of the original Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?.

[31][30] The beginning of the plot is as follows: "You are a famous crimebuster hot on the trail of that world-renowned thief, Carmen Santiago (sic), and her latest gang.

[30] In Where in Hell is Carmen Santiago?, the players need to use detective skills and knowledge of facts from Canticle One of Dante's Commedia: Inferno.