The four eras of time
How Where in Time carved fifteen centuries of history into four travelable spans aboard the Chronoskimmer.
Four spans, fifteen centuries
Where in Time (1989) trades geography for chronology, covering roughly 1,500 years of history — from around 400 AD up through the mid-20th century, per Brøderbund’s own period description of the game. A retrospective review of the game’s NES conversion breaks that span into four defined periods travelers can be sent to: 400–1299, 1300–1699, 1700–1899, and 1900–present. Whether the original DOS and Apple II releases label the eras identically isn’t confirmed here, but the four-century-block structure is the one documented in detail.
Cases across the ages
The same reviewer describes working through eighty cases in that version of the game — each one sending the player to a different point inside those four spans rather than to a different place on a map, aboard ACME’s Chronoskimmer 325i. Whichever port a player picks up, the underlying idea is the same: instead of an airline ticket to the next city, the tool of the trade is a machine that drops the detective into a different century, with the case clock counting down against the crook slipping further back — or forward — before the trail is picked up again.
A different kind of geography
Because the “destination” is a moment rather than a location, the clue-reading skill shifts too: instead of flags and capitals, witnesses point to events, inventions, and figures tied to a specific century. The boxed New American Desk Encyclopedia — see the boxed reference library — was built for exactly that kind of lookup, cross-referencing names and dates rather than countries and currencies.
A sibling with a narrower lens
Where in America’s Past (1991) later applied this same era-hopping structure to a single country’s history rather than the whole world’s, spanning nine historical eras across forty-five locations. Read together, the two games show the same design move Where in the U.S.A. made for geography a few years earlier: take a proven world-spanning format and refit it to a single nation for a second round of cases.
Brøderbund’s own pitch for the game at the time kept it simple: “Chase Carmen through the ages! Investigate 1500 years of historical events, famous people and important inventions.” That’s the whole premise in two sentences — the same detective loop as every other title in the line, just with a device instead of an airline ticket, and a millennium and a half of material to search for a fugitive in.