10 /10 1 Votes10
Designer(s) David Lo Initial release date June 1983 Mode Single-player video game | 5/5 My Abandonware Release date(s) 1983 Genre Surrealism | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Atari st beyond the tesseract
Beyond the Tesseract is a text based adventure game developed in 1983 by David Lo for the TRS-80. The game was notable for its unique take on the genre and approach to mathematical entities and abstract concepts. In one section the player must navigate a text adventure game, inside the text adventure game. In another the player, while asleep, derives a proof using physical representations of various symbolic logic components.
Contents
The game is intentionally vague using a VERB NOUN gameplay mechanic with a vocabulary of just 200.
In 1988 the game was ported to Atari ST, MS-DOS and Solaris environments and, in 2003, to interactive fiction standard of machine-independent Z-code.
Original Annotated Solution
(spoiler alert)
Tesseract was meant to be a sequel to Project Triad, but when it was finished I found that it had no solid relation to Triad. The program started from an example I used when I tried to write an article on how to write an adventure. The example, as far as I could remember it, was "using a definitive function to get by a field of improbability."
The word play in Tesseract is the acrostic. The first letter of the important words in the hidden message form the word "tesseract." Since the message also contains the word "tesseract", the message can be thought of as self-containing. The "hint" to an acrostic is the stack (Space-Time Activated Continuum Key). The 12-word message is:
"The Eternal Soul Seeks the Exact Reasons and Answers of Countless Tesseracts"The message is divided into 4 lines, with each line being presented at the end of its puzzle.
1. Book World
put disk in projector kick projector push 4 read tombstone (1)The fractals worlds used to be vegetables beings (nursery/peach baby, "Gather No Moss" Concert/asparagus youth, hyper-lab/potato assistant, lettuce scientist) performing tasks that the player needs use in solving the puzzles. There was some humour/logic to the selection of the vegetables and beings, but the reason is so obtuse it makes the Far Side look logical.
- Peach is like a baby, pink and fuzzy. The baby was spinning a one-sided toy. - Asparagus is an aphrodisiac, and youths are hormone-filled. The youth was wearing a audio apparatus. - Lettuce is a head, hence a egghead/brainy scientist. The scientist did nothing. - Potato is also called spud, and Spud seems to be a good low-ranking name. The assistant was Y'ing polyhedrons.I was going to have dust on the mountain, then melt the snowflake to grow a fractal plant, which is the prequel to the plant-being in the mirror world.
2. Prism
break prism read tetrahedron at spectrum (2)3. Dream World
prove suppostion with postulates to get lemma prove hypothesis with axiom (and lemma) to get theorem give theorem to math (or wake math with theorem on ground) at words of fire (4)This provides a foreshadowing of the ending.
4. Plant Being
roll dice 3 times and add numbers y dice to get 4-D solid y strip to get bottle melt solid at plasma to get 4-D liquid fill bottle with liquid water alien (or cool coil, spin coil at monopoles, get plasma, then either melt solid at plant, or melt solid anywhere and fill bottle etc.) get function get improbability (use sum of numbers, or .# of voices in fugue) use improbability at certainty solve integral with function insert singularity in earphones wear earphones listen to plant (8)The TRS-80 version didn't use _Y_, which was my internal notation. The _'s were replaced with random consonants (e.g. byk, tyv, etc.) at run-time.
The function and integral is analogous to a weapon v.s. monster puzzle (the sword has many sharp points, and the monster is vicious.) During the translation, I thought of using a glider gun and a dragon curve, but somehow that was replaced by the function and integral. Originally there was no integral or function. Instead, there was a one-sided polygon that you spin to get a mono-filter.