Beyond the Tesseract
Description
Early (1983) TRS-80 BASIC text adventure game, the middle in a forgotten trilogy (sandwiched between "Project Triad" and "Codename Intrepid"), remembered for its no-holds-barred approach to math and logic concepts informing game settings and puzzles: in one section, sparking a genre cliche, one has to play a text adventure game inside the text adventure game; in another, one falls asleep and in a dream constructs a proof utilising physical representations of various components of symbolic logic; additional game areas are accessed by pushing and popping the stack, objects extruded from 2 to 3 dimensions by _y_ing them.
The supporting documentation understates when it claims the scenario for the adventure is meant to be vague -- searching for a 12-word code phrase (unlocked in chunks upon completion of certain puzzles) is just an excuse for sending an unwary player through an alien and abstract setting two words at a time (using VERB NOUN gameplay with a vocabulary of about 200).
Later (1988) versions of this game were ported in C to Solaris, Atari ST and MS-DOS environments; more recently, in December 2003, Andrew Plotkin ported it to the interactive fiction standard of machine-independent Z-code.
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Credits (DOS version)
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Average score: 50% (based on 1 ratings)
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Average score: 2.9 out of 5 (based on 2 ratings with 0 reviews)
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Trivia
Inspiration
How many games include a recommended reading list? In the game documentation, David Lo states The following books and reference works were used at one time or another as a source of information and/or inspiration:* The Beauty of Fractals. * The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. * The Fractal Geometry of Nature. * Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. * The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary Of the English Language. * Mathematics: The New Golden Age. * The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary, Encyclopedic Edition. * The Penguin Dictionary of Science, Fifth Edition. * Roget's International Thesaurus. * The Science of Fractal Images. * The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. * The World of M.C. Escher.
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Related Sites +
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WURB entry for Beyond the Tesseract
Contains links to DOS, Atari ST and Z-code versions of the game; also, C source code, a walkthrough and review from SPAG. -
everything2 node: beyond the tesseract
As much information as was out there -- a pastiche of original commentary, transcript and excerpts from reviews and documentation.
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Pseudo_Intellectual.
Additional contributors: Patrick Bregger.
Game added February 8, 2005. Last modified October 9, 2023.