Where’s Waldo?

Where's Waldo

The year 1987 marked the debut Where’s Wally? (localized as Where’s Waldo? in North America and Canada). Conceived by English illustrator, Martin Handford, Where’s Wally? helped popularize what is occasionally referred to as a wimmelbilderbuch, a German term roughly translating to, “teeming picture book.” Works in this genre are, for the most part, wordless, and instead typically feature full-spread images on gatefold pages. The biggest appeal of Where’s Wally? and other books of its ilk was that a game was made out of examining these illustrations. Each of them are richly detailed, featuring numerous humans, animals, and other assorted objects in everyday, yet lively scenes such as zoos, town squares, or amusement parks. The title character was hidden in every one of these illustrations, and the goal was to locate him. He is known for his simple, yet distinctive appearance, wearing a red-and-white striped shirt and round glasses, but the books often include several red herrings to make the task far more difficult than one would initially assume.

The books became a hit, selling more than forty million copies worldwide. Because its widespread popularity coincided with the rise of home console games, people in the industry naturally wished to somehow capitalize on this success. In 1991, THQ published Where’s Waldo? for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It would seem like a sound choice. After all, entirely new IPs on this platform often sold thousands, if not millions, of copies; it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that one bearing a famous, bestselling license would as well.

Analyzing the Experience

Usually when I write game reviews, I try not to make my stance too obvious right away. To accomplish this, I typically explain the most relevant mechanics to establish what kind of game it is before I delve into whether or not or they work. Should the situation require it, I then follow a similar process for story analyses by summarizing the basic premise before expressing my own subjective thoughts. Should the need arise, I use screenshots as visual aids to make my case for some of the more bizarre mechanics or writing decisions. My ultimate reason for writing in such a way is so the audience has a better idea about how I arrive at these conclusions.

You may be wondering why I’m starting off this review describing the process I go through rather than talking about the game. The answer is that this is a game where it’s difficult to remain neutral when discussing it for any significant length of time. This is because I think just by showing you just one screenshot, you will be able to precisely gauge this game’s quality. When examining it, keep in mind that the premise of Where’s Waldo? is, much like the picture books it’s based on, to locate the title character in a crowded setting.

Where's Waldo NES - Who KnowsAs you can see, this is easier said than done. I usually try not to overanalyze the graphics of the games I review because I believe they’re ultimately irrelevant as long as it is fun to play or tells an engrossing story. I have no choice to but to make an exception here because Where’s Waldo? is a rare game where the defining flaw lies with its unpleasant visuals. Specifically, it’s nearly impossible to discern Waldo from any other character on the screen because his sprite only barely stands out. In some cases, he doesn’t even appear in his signature red-and-white shirt, opting for one that matches the background of whichever level you happen to be on, meaning anyone familiar with what he looks like in this game would struggle to find him. I can only imagine what an ordeal playing this game on a CRT television screen would have been.

Where's Waldo NES - Camo

|He’s just above the cursor.|

The game’s appalling presentation would be enough to condemn it as one of the worst experiences one could have with the NES, but incredibly, this is only scratching the surface. To properly set up my next points, I need to discuss the game’s difficulty setting. There are four modes: practice, easy, medium, and hard. On higher difficulties, you are given less time to complete the entire game – you have ten minutes on easy, seven on medium, and five on hard. On harder difficulties, the scenes become larger and more elaborate while the cursor shrinks in size.

You wouldn’t think that such a basic game would be plagued with awful controls, but this perfectly reasonable assumption is incorrect. Sometimes you’ll find Waldo only to waste time trying to position the cursor on him. You have to make subtle taps on the directional pad in order to get it exactly right – holding it down for too long causes it to fly to the other side of the screen. It’s not advisable to make too many mistakes because each wrong answer decreases the amount of time you have left. Sadly, this isn’t even the worst aspect about the time limit. The minute you press “start” on the difficulty selection screen, it begins to tick down. Unless you press the button a second time immediately afterward, you’ll end up wasting about five seconds. Furthermore, in between levels, you are treated to a cutscene of Waldo walking to the next stage, and he never walks straight to his destination. Instead, he just seems to wander around the area before actually entering it. That there’s no way to skip this is annoying on its own, but there’s a worse problem with it: the countdown never actually stops. This means the cutscene between stages can shave off as many as fifteen seconds – an amount that adds up the further you progress.

Where's Waldo NES - Cave

Possibly because the programmers realized that an entire game where you do nothing but stare at a screen, looking for a barely distinguishable sprite would make for a monotonous experience, there are three levels which offer new challenges to the player. The first involves finding Waldo in a dark cave. Unlike the search stages, he is not stationary, and you will occasionally catch glimpses of him. Moreover, the cursor acts as a flashlight, allowing you to pinpoint his location easier. Incorrect guess are not penalized in this level, but the cursor doesn’t move as you press the button, so it’s only a good idea to mash it when you think he’s close. Once you’ve found him, you assume control of Waldo. From here you can either proceed to the next stage right away or pick up the hourglass that shows up, which will randomly add or subtract a minute depending on how lucky you are. Because the cave is one of the earlier stages, it’s almost always worth it to take a chance to add a minute to make up for the time wasted by the rest of the game.

Where's Waldo NES - Subway

The second minigame takes place in a subway station. In this level, the objective is to navigate the maze and collect both Waldo and his pair of missing glasses, represented by cards. By facing one of the octagonal tiles and pressing the “B” button, you can divert the tracks, allowing access to otherwise unreachable squares. However, you don’t want to idle for too long because the third card is a character who rapidly drains your time if you’re occupying the same space as him. It’s not as though he can only move one square at a time; you could be on the exact opposite side of the screen only for him to teleport right to your exact location. The only way you can avoid him is to reach the edges of the maze or time it so that he moves as you’re traveling down one of the paths. If you’re not on a tile he can enter, he chooses a random location instead. Needless to say, this is frustrating – especially because one mistake can cost you the game.

Where's Waldo NES - Slot Machine

Finally, the endgame stage is a slot machine where the goal is to line up three pictures of Waldo. There is a degree of skill involved in memorizing the order of the character portraits, but it doesn’t change the perception that it feels like your success is left to chance. The worst part about it is that the cursor moves too slowly, taking a little more than a second to move from one button to the next. I’d say the developers messing up the controls on something as rudimentary as a slot machine is a testament to just how poorly thought out it truly is.

Drawing a Conclusion


  • None

  • Awful controls
  • Bland music
  • Artificially difficult
  • Graphics actively make gameplay worse
  • Extremely short
  • Boring gameplay

Sometimes, games in other mediums simply don’t translate well to an electronic form, and Where’s Waldo? proved to be one of them. This isn’t to say the idea was completely without merit. After all, there is little replay value to the books due to the obvious fact that they never change. It doesn’t matter how difficult it is to find Waldo; he will always be in the same spot. A video game adaptation could generate new levels randomly to provide a different experience each time, but then again, I think this too misses the appeal of the books, which would be appreciating just how much detail went into crafting each and every one of these illustrations. You simply can’t do that when you’re not allowed to see the entire picture at once.

Where’s Waldo? is considered by many gaming fans to be one of the worst NES games ever made. After playing it for myself, I can say it absolutely deserves this distinction. Entertaining the thought of people actually paying $50 in 1990 for a game that could be completed in less than an hour is distressing to say the least. One of the unequivocal benefits of the internet is that companies have a much more difficult time selling products with a famous license alone.

Now, some people reading this may wonder why I even bothered reviewing this game when its unsavory reputation precedes it. Surprisingly, it’s not because I grew up with this game; instead, what drove me to write about Where’s Waldo? had more to do with who made it than anything else.

Where's Waldo - The Sobering Realization

Your eyes do not deceive you. One of the first products of the company that would later take inspiration from Ultima Underworld to create the immensely popular Elder Scrolls series of open-world action-RPGs was Where’s Waldo? for the NES. It should also be noted they had a hand in creating the equally abysmal Home Alone video game adaptation for the same system. There have been countless times when these legendarily awful works were made by some no-name company even people using the finest search internet engines available to them would be hard-pressed to find any information about. This was not one of those cases; instead, Where’s Waldo? was the product of group of developers who had not yet found their stride. It’s amazing to think if they never did, we would be living in a universe where the reputation of Bethesda Softworks was only slightly better than that of Active Enterprises.

Final Score: 1/10

18 thoughts on “Where’s Waldo?

  1. I honestly did not even know this game existed.

    I can totally see why such a concept would not work on the NES. Not only are the details that developers can place on sprites minimum, one of the greatest features of the books is how pleasant to look at, and detailed, the scenarios are; they are brimming with funny and intriguing situations, and you cannot have that on a system with a hardware as limited as that of the NES.

    Plus, those extra levels sound absolutely terrible.

    Great review!

    Liked by 2 people

    • Hopefully that means not too many people bought it!

      To be honest, I have a difficult time imagining this idea working as a console game – even on one with superior graphics. I can see it working somewhat as a computer game where you can examine the screen closely and have access to a control scheme that allows for quicker scrolling, but I think it would still lack the appeal of the books. With the books, half of the fun is examining the illustrations, but with a video game adaptation, all of the challenge lies with finding Waldo. When a picture is randomly generated, it’s just white noise. Whatever the case may be, an NES adaptation was a concept doomed from the start.

      Liked by 2 people

  2. Believe it or not, there was actually ANOTHER Waldo game that was released for the SNES, under the name of The Great Waldo Search. It’s significantly less abhorrent than this game, though that’s not saying much.

    Liked by 1 person

    • I have seen gameplay footage of that game and its NES port, and it does look slightly better. But as you say, it’s an extremely low bar; after all, Pac-Man 2 and Metroid: Other M are both far superior to Where’s Waldo.

      Liked by 1 person

      • That’s a bit of an unfair comparison, in my opinion. Those two games at least have a few remotely unique ideas going for them, but a WW video game is one of those ideas that will just end in failure no matter what.

        Liked by 1 person

        • That’s the difference between a 2/10 and a 1/10 from me. I can at least see somebody enjoying a 2/10 work ironically because maybe it had one or two good (or even just plain bizarre) ideas. A 1/10 is a work I can’t imagine anyone enjoying – not even in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

          Liked by 1 person

  3. I played where’s waldo once, for a few minutes. The game didn’t grab me, oddly enough. Just something about the complete lack of good times to be had there completely drove me off. Strange.

    So, is Waldo actually red and green striped in this game, the way it looks in your screenshot? If so, no wonder I couldn’t find him.

    I’ve gone through enough TCG video games to learn that usually, there’s a reason that games are developed in their original medium, and while it is possible to make a good video game adaptation out of other games, it often loses something in the process if the developer isn’t smart about it or able to make some changes in the conversion.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Also, Bethsoft was behind this? I’m surprised at how much the company’s changed. I can think of Rare and Blizzard also falling into the same camp, developing really crappy cash-ins back in the day before digging some talent out of the trash can somewhere and hitting it big on their original creations.

      Liked by 1 person

      • I know; shocking, isn’t it?

        The color of his outfits depends on the difficulty and the stage you’re on. On easier difficulties and the first stage, he’s in his traditional red-and-white outfit (in the first screenshot, he’s one square up and one right from the blue umbrella in the bottom-center of the screen). In some stages, however, he appears in red and green as in the above screenshot, but there are other color schemes such as blue-and-white or even brown-and-dark-brown. It’s designed in a way that he blends into the background – even if it makes no sense to ever see him outside of his trademark outfit.

        A TCG video game would be difficult to make. Back before the concept of DLC, they would be outdated as soon as a new wave of cards hit the market. With DLC, the developers would constantly have to add patches to fit the new cards – sometimes even new rules – ideally while adding new content. At some point, the game would be more DLC than original content. Plus if one is constantly spending money on DLC, they’ve negated the point of a TCG video game (only having to pay once). As you say, I think this concept of translating non-electronic games into this medium isn’t an unsalvageable idea, but it would take more than simply making a 1:1 conversion, which is a common pitfall a lot of developers stumble into.

        Yup, Bethesda was behind this game. In fact, they even recycled audio clips from another title of theirs released earlier in the same year: Wayne Gretzky Hockey. The music that plays when you find Waldo is same as the faceoff theme from that game. Also, the game over theme from Where’s Waldo? is the music that plays when someone scores a goal in Wayne Gretzky Hockey. I too am surprised that a company could go from creating several awful console games before finding success with The Elder Scrolls. It would appear as though they were just more adept on the PC platform than in the console market. Granted, they found their way back to consoles again starting with Oblivion with their quality ports, but they never truly left the PC. It’s kind of like how Origin Systems was behind the Ultima and Wing Commander series, yet created Metal Morph during one of their rare forays into console gaming.

        These days, it seems like a company needs to have a success right off the bat; otherwise, they’re done for. It wasn’t like back in the NES days when they could mess up several times in their attempts to find their stride. I’m not sure about Blizzard’s early output, but I know Rare is a great comparison for this case study. I was even thinking of them when I was typing the last paragraph, lest we forget that many of those awful games published by LJN were actually made by Rare.

        Liked by 1 person

  4. I rented this game a lot as a kid. I have no idea why, I think even then I knew it was a really bad game. I think it was because I just really liked the Waldo book. The sad thing is I played the game so much that I can actually find Waldo in those screenshots above. Even thought the sprites look nothing like the character, they’re just seared in my brain.

    Liked by 1 person

    • I think we’ve all had that one work we loved as a kid that we watched/played/read all the time only to be left wondering exactly what we were thinking when we got older. For me, that would be Pac-Man 2. I still have no idea how 8-year-old me figured that game out.

      How much more difficult was it to play with a CRT TV screen?


  5. Very interesting! Thanks for sharing. I didn’t realize there had been a Where’s Waldo game. It’s cool seeing this, reminding us that just because you produced a mega flop doesn’t mean you are toast. Imagine if they had let this game be the end.

    Can you imagine a new Where’s Waldo game with our better graphics? And with a better set of controls 😅 it could just be the book in game form, where the pages have tons of similar type sprites (beach characters for the beach, silly mideival things for castles) that randomly generate on the map each time! That way you never know where Waldo is from a previous play through.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Trying to replicate the experience on an NES was a rather foolhardy idea. I imagine the concept would be better executed on a modern console, though it seems like it would be better as a mini-game than a full-fledged, standalone title. I think there is a mini-game like that in the first New Super Mario Bros.

      It reminds me a lot of Square in that much of their output before Final Fantasy wasn’t all that great. In both cases, it sure didn’t take all that long for them to get good. To think that had things gone differently, they would be lumped in the same category as the people who made Action 52.

      Thank you for reading!

      Liked by 1 person


  7. Pingback: New Years Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 5 – Pop Culture Literary

    • This is definitely one of those games that’s as ugly as it is unwieldy. And even that statement feels a little too generous. It may not be the worst game I’ve played (if only because it’s mercifully short), but its low esteem is well earned.

      Liked by 1 person

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