Beyond the Tesseract (DOS)

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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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Part of the Following Group

• Z-Code

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Critic Reviews

SPAG

Jul 26, 1995

5 out of 10

50

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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.

Related Web Sites

• everything2 node: beyond the tesseract (As much information as was out there -- a pastiche of original commentary, transcript and excerpts from reviews and documentation.)
• 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.)