Making Treasures of Knowledge
An ImageBuilder Software production for The Learning Company, mastered in August 2001, honoured by Parents' Choice and the AIAS, and back on sale through Steam in 2020.
Treasures of Knowledge came out under The Learning Company’s name, three years after TLC bought Brøderbund (see the Learning Company CD-ROM era). Reviews and the AIAS awards listing credit TLC. The manual tells a fuller story.
Two studios and a cartoon house
The user’s guide carries the ImageBuilder logo on its cover and a copyright line for “© 2001 ImageBuilder Software” next to TLC’s. ImageBuilder’s credits cover game design (Karen Beall, Shannon Keegan and Andrew Shafe), production (Shafe as senior producer, Keegan as creative director), software engineering (Steve Lamb), art (Steven Louie as art lead) and animation (Suzanne Smits as lead). The Learning Company’s block lists its own creative director, Kenny Dinkin, art director Nicholas Stern, development producer Nancy Wood, four education designers and an audio team with casting and directing by Jim Foote. Character art development went to Wild Brain Studios, whose project page credits John Hays as director.
Borrowed reference
The database leans on outside material: maps © 1999 Digital Wisdom, and “reference material and location music courtesy of National Geographic Society,” with portions of content © 1995 NGS. A note at the foot of the credits concedes that the country backgrounds are based on real photographs but that “creative and artistic liberties have been taken.”
Release
The disc in this archive was mastered on 30 August 2001, going by its volume date, and the game was in reviewers’ hands by October: Jinny Gudmundsen covered it in the Los Angeles Times on October 11, 2001, listing a $25 price and ages 8 to 12, with “Eight fabulous missions” as the good news and “Low replay value” as the bad. The date most databases repeat, 12 November 2001, falls a month after that review. The manual covers both platforms: Windows 95 through XP on a Pentium 166, or a PowerPC Mac at 180 MHz on System 8.6 to 9.1 or OS X, each with 32 MB of RAM and 40 MB of disk.
Awards and reviews
The Parents’ Choice Foundation gave it a Gold Award in its Spring 2002 software list. Reviewer Don Oldenburg’s only complaints were “occasionally trying too hard with witty banter between Jules and Shadow and a few too many non-interactive video clips.” That listing names the maker as Riverdeep/The Learning Company and quotes $24.95 retail, $69.95 for schools. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences gave it the PC Educational award at its fifth annual awards in 2002.
The Steam release
On 31 August 2020 it went on sale on Steam under the plain title Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, with Encore Inc. as publisher and The Learning Company as developer, for Windows 7 through 11. The store page promises “8 challenging missions,” “15 amazing high-tech virtual gadgets” and key facts on 50 countries. For other ways to play the old games now, see preserving and playing today.