I've been watching the new Carmen Sandiego Netflix show with my fiancée, and I've noticed it has a tendency to do geographical infodumping (Carmen is travelling to Indonesia, time to casually mention it's primary export, distinctive fauna and traditional art forms). Which makes some sense; the original game was edutainment about geography, right?

Today I learned (according to Wikipedia ): the original "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" game was not originally intended as an educational game. The game shipped with copies of the World Almanac and players needed at certain points in the game to answer questions with information from there, and at least part of the point of that was copy protection.

(this also explains why I found those questions so frustrating when playing as a kid and without access to a World Almanac. How the hell was I supposed to know when Fiji became independent? Turns out, I wasn't)