In 1996, President Bill Clinton met the co-leaders of San Marino at the Olympics and later admitted he only knew where the microstate was because of Carmen Sandiego. This deep dive traces the biography of a fictional character born at Broderbund in 1985, when programmer Dane Bigham's cops-and-robbers menu game for the Apple II was steered toward world geography by co-founder Gary Carlston, who decided to ship a physical World Almanac in every box. Writer David Siefkin, drawing on his backpacking travels, added the ACME Detective Agency, the villainous network V.I.L.E., and a deliberately exotic female villain designed to draw girls into gaming.

The hosts explain why Broderbund banned the word educational in favor of explorational, how a 38-dollar classroom price created a pull-through effect that had kids begging parents for home copies, an ...