Surely, this will never become dated!
Where in Europe Is Carmen Sandiego? is the third installment in the Carmen Sandiego franchise by Brøderbund Software. It features the same format as its predecessors, just with the focus being on European geography this time.The game came out in 1988, which is really, really bad timing for a game based on European geography. Sure enough, the Hole in Flag revolutions took place just a year later, rendering the game dated. The 1990 re-release tried to correct for this by removing East Germany as a location, but the changes only accelerated after that. The next few years saw the dissolutions of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, all of which are obviously featured in the game. Moreover, the euro was introduced in the late '90s, making the game dated whenever it uses the name of a former European currency as a clue.
Unlike the World and U.S.A. games, Where in Europe never received a remake.
This game provides examples of:
- Copy Protection: Horrible, horrible copy protection. Arguably some of the most frustrating of all time. You can play all you want, but to get promoted and even have a chance to capture Carmen, you have to enter certain words from certain pages of the included travel guides every few cases. At least with World, the reference was an Almanac; most of the information in one of those can now be found on Wikipedia. Europe used an atlas and asked questions about what color country X on page Y was. Have fun guessing!
- Da Chief: Your boss, who is still treated as The Ghost at this point.
- Intangible Theft: An item stolen from Belgium is "the keys to the Common Market." The Common Market is another name for the European Economic Community, which was the predecessor to The European Union. An item stolen from the United Kingdom is the prime meridian.
- It's a Small World, After All: As usual for this series, the game treats entire countries as a single location. For example, one item stolen "from" Belgrade is the Begova Mosque, which is actually in Sarajevo. Nowadays, Belgrade and Sarajevo aren't even in the same country anymore!
- Micro Monarchy: The game includes every country in 1988-era Europe, and that means these too. Hope you know enough about Liechtenstein to recognize clues about it!
- Updated Re-release: As with World and U.S.A., Europe got an "enhanced" version in 1990. In addition to the usual updates, it removed East Berlin as a possible location, since the Berlin Wall had come down by that point. While Munich had represented West Germany in the 1988 version, the 1990 version promotes the Bavarian capital to representing the new united Germany... maybe. The 1990 version does still contain occasional references to "West Germany" and "East Germany." Maybe Brøderbund forgot to take those out or maybe they were just hedging their bets over the likelihood of imminent German reunification.
