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Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? is an educational video game released in 1985. It is the earliest version of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? as well as the first product in the entire Carmen Sandiego franchise. The game was distributed with The World Almanac and Book of Facts, published by Pharos Books. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was included in some software packages with the Amiga 500.

An updated version of the game was released in 1989, that did not have the almanac copy protection but disk based copy protection. A remake, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe was released in 1992.

The chase

The goal of the game is to track Carmen's villains around the world, arrest them and ultimately arrest Carmen herself. The player begins the game by first going to the country where the crime took place and then obtaining hints from various sources on where the thief went next, leading to a chase around the world to find the thief before time runs out.

Each case begins with the user being alerted that a spectacular theft has been committed. Starting by first traveling to the scene of the crime, the player is given several opportunities to collect clues about the suspect's next location, which come in the form of pun-filled word play about the target place. There are thirty countries that can be visited in the game and each is identified by the name of a prominent city, though this city is not always consistent with the image of the country shown in the game. For example, Lima is given for Peru, but the game instead shows an image of Machu Picchu.

If the player travels to an incorrect location, they receive nonsensical clues and will have to backtrack to the previous location to try again. If the player travels to the correct location, a simple animation of an obvious but otherwise harmless V.I.L.E. henchman lurking across the screen is played. The gameplay continues to repeat in this manner as the player travels from location to location several times before catching up to the criminal.

The case will be lost if the user "runs out of time". Throughout the game, the time is shown as the hour accompanied by the day of the week and every action taken in the game (questioning a witness, traveling to another location, etc.) causes a few hours to elapse. At the start of the game a "deadline" is given by which point the crook must be arrested and, if that time is passed, the case is lost and the crook escapes. The times given in the game do not take changes of time zones into account.

The warrant and the arrest

The player will occasionally be given information on the suspect, enabling the player to exclude all but one of the suspects in Interpol's database of V.I.L.E. members. Once the player eliminates all but one suspect, Interpol issues what the game describes as an arrest warrant against that suspect; in real life, Interpol can issue only a "red notice," with issuance of the actual arrest warrant being the prerogative of the local jurisdiction. If a player enters a combination of attributes that eliminates all possible members of the database, the game will inform the player to that effect and refuse to issue any warrant.

Once the player reaches the final location, the animation of the nearby V.I.L.E. henchman becomes more aggressive and implies imminent danger and any clues the player receives simply suggest that they should watch their back. Investigating further clues lead to a chase scene and the attempted apprehending of the thief which results in an off-screen fight, which will be successful if and only if a warrant for that particular suspect was issued. If there was no warrant issued, or the warrant issued is for someone else besides the suspect, the police will lose the fight, allowing the thief to escape and causing a lone remaining policeman to walk away defeated.

Each successful mission is noted in the player's record and they will occasionally go up in rank. Before being promoted, the user had to correctly answer a geography question with the help of a reference book that was included with the program. This was included as a form of protection against disk copying. Each rank gives harder assignments with more locations to travel to before arriving at the final one. In the final case, the culprit is Carmen Sandiego herself and apprehending her lands the player in the hall of fame.