Mapping Out Profit : Atlas, Computer Game Firms Busy Redrawing Changing Borders
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? For a while, the computer-game villainess can be found traipsing through the Soviet Union with a host of international detectives hot on her tail. But not for long.
Plans are in the works at Broderbund Software Inc. to have avid computer game players chase the leading spy of VILE--the Villainous International League of Evil--throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States, among other parts of the changing globe.
Keeping time with political change, Novato-based Broderbund plans to update the entertaining and educational software for “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” and “Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?” as soon as the game’s accompanying almanacs are amended next year.
“For a product like this, used so heavily in the school market, we want it to reflect what’s happening in the world as quickly as we can,” said Claire Curtain, Broderbund’s product manager. But they don’t want to reprogram before the political dust has settled, she said.
Worldwide political upheaval has kept those whose business it is to be worldly--in a geographical sense--on their toes since January, 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and renamed it the 19th province of Iraq.
Since then, the Baltic republics of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have become independent, the 12 other former Soviet republics followed, and about 46 cities have changed their names. Yugoslavia appears to be a work in progress. And this is on just two of the seven continents.
The changes have created headaches as well as moneymaking opportunities for computer engineers and cartographers, whose map making business last year generated $300 million in sales, according to the International Map Dealers Assn.
“This is a remarkably dynamic time for these industries,” said Trish Caldwell Lingren, president of Caldwell Associates, a consultant for designer maps for the media. “And large map making companies will make money from this, no question.”
Still, whenever Richard Burger, vice president of corporate communications for PC Globe Inc. of Tempe, Ariz., hears the word Commonwealth, he sighs and rolls his eyes.
“We’re just in wild misery,” he said. “Everything we hear about is the Commonwealth--it’s maddening.”
Every year, PC Globe updates its electronic atlas, the PC Globe 4.0, which is used primarily for educational purposes. It allows computer users to zoom into more than 190 countries. Although the company is accustomed to making changes, this year the number of changes has required extra work and more investment.
Creating PC Globe 5.0 will cost $20,000, but Burger expects a tremendous boost in sales to compensate for the expense. Mailing to current program owners should bring in $150,000, and retail sales should be “huge.” In 1991, company sales soared 30% over the year before--a result, Burger says, of Germany’s reunification and the Kuwait invasion.
The process is not as tedious for Broderbund’s Carmen Sandiego games, but it could be costly, Curtain said. She estimates that more than $10,000 will be spent for two weeks of labor by computer graphic artists, managers and writers.
Another worldly video game personality, Nigel the snap-happy photographer, will stop trekking to the Soviet Union any week now. The Scotsman teaches geography to children 7 through 12 by searching the world’s landscape for the photo that will transform him from a mere shutterbug to master photographer.
Lawrence Productions Inc., the Michigan-based maker of “Nigel’s World,” came out with a new version of the program last November that recognized the Baltic States. The company plans to keep the software as updated as possible without making changes every week, said Tim Knapper, vice president of marketing.
“We keep talking about it in our weekly meetings,” he said. “But it requires extra cost and takes time. For little software companies, time is a precious commodity.”
Map makers, on the other hand, await sales increases as they prepare to release their new products this month. Map dealers are stocking up on them in hopes of high consumer demand.
Although his store relies more on travel books, Brian Draper of Geographia Map and Travel Bookstore in Burbank expects an increase in sales when the new maps arrive. “There is a heightened demand, although it isn’t being satisfied at this point,” he said.
During the Persian Gulf War, Draper found that sales increased 10% for world maps and maps of the Middle East.
Rand McNally, the oldest commercial map maker in the nation, has begun printing a special Europe Map due out late this month. The company’s New Cosmopolitan World Atlas, which came out last fall, is going into its second printing--an unusual step for atlases, which are printed to last a full year.
Rand McNally is also revising editions of its Cosmopolitan World Map, due out soon, which will include changes up to mid-January. Expected in March is the International World Map. A private company, Rand McNally declined to reveal its sales projections.
“All that’s going on in the world has created a demand for map publication,” said Conroy Erickson, a spokesman for Rand McNally, which is based in Skokie, Ill. “These are the most significant changes in maps that we have seen at least since World War II, and that has been a very exciting thing.”
Map maker Hammond Inc. of Maplewood, N.J., is having a hard time deciding what to do with Yugoslavia before going to press with its new set of maps.
“We’d like to give them a deadline,” said spokeswoman Gwen Baker. The company is holding out as long as it can before laying out the country’s borders.
Hammond is putting a lot of money and even more time into the changes, and Baker said it expects sales to pick up in a few months. The company will come out with several updated maps this month and a top-of-the-line atlas in April.
Meanwhile, geography teachers await the day that they can point to an accurate map and overhead transparency instead of a laminated newspaper graphic to note the changes.
For Greg Barker, a world history and geography teacher at Thousand Oaks High School, maps are a crucial part of his lesson plan, because he often teaches history in terms of geographical change. He and other teachers in the Conejo Valley Unified School District have been shopping for new maps since last year. They hope to make purchases sometime this year.
“In the meantime, we struggle,” Barker said.
