Reception and awards, 1985–1997
What contemporary reviewers and the software industry's award bodies actually said about the DOS-era games, with the specific outlets and years.
Reviews of the original 1985 game were positive from the start. Computer Gaming World wrote that “the graphics are nice and the manual is well written with a dossier on each thief. The game is good for schools.” Compute! praised how it helped “teach research skills and fundamentals of geography” while staying “entertaining enough to disguise” the fact players were learning. Info magazine's review of the Commodore 64 port gave it four-plus stars, calling it “a really good educational game” players enjoyed without noticing the lesson.
The sequel drew similar notices. Reviewing Where in the U.S.A., Computer Gaming World called it “a valuable tool for teaching geography, reference book use, map reading, and deductive reasoning”; Compute!'s Gazette said it was “so intriguing that players will be drawn to it again and again, learning a little more about logic, common sense, and U.S. geography each time”; and Info 30 gave it 4.5 stars, noting it was “engrossing” enough that players wouldn't register they were studying.
The awards
The industry's own award bodies were just as generous. The Software Publishers Association (SPA) named Where in the World its Best Learning Product for 1985, and Classroom Computer Learning gave it an Outstanding Software Award in 1986. In 1987, Where in the U.S.A. won two CODiE Awards — Best General Education Program and Best Primary School Education Program. By April 1989 the SPA had certified the original game's sales past 500,000 units, and Compute! handed it a Compute! Choice Award in the educational-software category that same year. In 1990, Where in Time won the CODiE for Best Home Learning Program. Aggregate franchise-wide totals are softer ground: secondary sources put the count at more than sixty industry awards by 1997, including a dozen SPA Excellence Awards for Best Education Programs and seven Parents' Choice Awards, but that specific tally doesn't trace back to a primary count the way the individually dated awards above do, so it's worth treating as a widely repeated estimate rather than a confirmed figure.
Decades later, in 2021, The Strong museum inducted the 1985 original into the World Video Game Hall of Fame — a retrospective honour rather than a contemporary one, but a measure of how the reviews held up.