Gene Portwood Jr.; Animator and Computer Artist

Raymond Eugene “Gene” Portwood Jr., a Disney animator and innovative computer artist who helped create the landmark learning game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” has died at the age of 66.

Portwood died July 17 of a heart attack in a Windsor, Calif., convalescent center. He had been at the center since a stroke 18 months ago.

The series of Apple computer games that Portwood launched with his partner, Lauren Elliott, at Marin County’s Broderbund Software has been credited with exciting youngsters about history and geography in the same way the current series of Harry Potter books has awakened them to the joy of reading.

The games require users (often adults as well as their offspring) to follow the trench-coated “fallen” spy, Carmen Sandiego, to solve a crime. The conclusion comes from solving clues--a process that requires the user to consult the atlas or encyclopedia packed with each computer disc. A typical clue or question: Identify what country Carmen is visiting if that nation’s currency is the krona (Iceland).

Portwood and Elliott were largely responsible for the first two of the games, “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” and “Where in the U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego?” Subsequent games by other designers explored subjects such as mathematics.

In 1992, Portwood and Elliott left Broderbund (later sold to the Learning Company and last year to Mattel) to form Elliott Portwood Productions. One of the games they produced was “The Incredible Adventures of Aristotle McGuffin,” which led children on a 14th century tour of England.

A native of Chicago, Portwood grew up in Burbank, where he showed an early talent for drawing cartoon characters. Skipping college, he joined the Disney animation team, which then consisted of 200 artists, in 1950. Long before computers made animation look easy, Portwood helped draw scenes for “Lady and the Tramp,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Captain Hook.”

Portwood spent five years with Disney, specializing, he often joked, in crickets. He drew countless images of the lovable little Jiminy Cricket to introduce segments of Disney’s weekly television program.

He left the animation business for a number of years to better support his family--working at Security National Bank in Orange County, Honeywell International and UC Berkeley. Always an artist and intrigued with the development of computer technology, he kept abreast of both and in Northern California he befriended the founders of Broderbund almost from its inception in 1980.

Among the computer games he helped design in the company’s early years were Drol, Lode Runner and Choplifter.

Portwood teamed with Elliott, who was trained in residential architecture, in 1982, and “Carmen” was not far behind. Elliott devised the history- and geography-related clues, and Portwood handled the graphics with his usual meticulous drawing.

“I learned at Disney,” he once said, “to sweat the details.”

The two middle-aged men stood out among their young peers, but their wacky sense of humor infected the whole company. Their official title was “creative consultant,” but the sign on the door of their shared office read “Department of Redundancy Reduction Department.”

Their office was filled with toys and gadgets, and evidence of their shared passions for wristwatches, Captain America comic books and Monty Python movies.

Colleagues said they could set their clocks by the two men’s routine--a bran muffin and coffee at 8:30 a.m., lunch at noon and a diet Coke at 3 p.m.

“We live on the razor’s edge!” Portwood quipped to The Times in 1989.

They developed a unique screening system for projects: If it could hold their attention for more than a week, it was worth developing.

Even though Portwood eschewed college, he was a voracious reader and had a lifelong love of words and wordplay. The location of Elliott Portwood Productions in Petaluma caused him to remark, for example: “You can pet a cat, but you can’t pet a luma.” One reason he loved working at Broderbund, he often said, was that it paid him to play with both words and computers.

Portwood is survived by his wife, Myra Bates Portwood; five daughters, Kim Portwood of Santa Rosa, and Kathy Gamberutti, Kari Hermanson, and Kelley and Kristi Portwood, all of Monterey; and two sisters, Lynette Foster of Redondo Beach and Darlene Insley of Santa Cruz.