Beyond the Tesseract

? 1983

Aka:: Tesseract
Language:: English
Authors:: David Lo
Platforms:: Atari ST, PC , TRS-80
Related:: 1: Project Triad, 2: Beyond the Tesseract, 3: Codename: Intrepid
Entered by:: dave, Strident
Added:: 11-12-2010
Edited:: 03-10-2022

Synopsis

Plot

You have reached the final part of your mission. You have gained access to the complex, and all but the last procedure has been performed. Now comes a time of waiting, in which you must search for the hidden 12-word message that will aid you at the final step. But what choice will you make when that time comes?

The scenario for the adventure is meant to be vague. Once the adventure has been completed, the scenario will hopefully become clear.

Notes

A mathematical adventure. Like David Lo's previous game, Tesseract features an adventure-within-an-adventure.

Originally written in BASIC for the TRS-80.

The later (1988) version 2.0 of the game was ported using Turbo C to MS-DOS. An additional version, 2.0p, was produced for other C compilers, and versions have been built for Sun-3 (Solaris), Apple II and Atari ST etc.

Andrew Plokin ported the game to Inform 6 in 2003. David Welbourn has produced a guide to this version.

David Lo wrote:

The idea of a mathematically abstract adventure came about during the summer of 1983, when I was reading the book "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". I had just read an article on writing adventures, and I thought about doing my own article on adventure writing. I did start on the article, and one of the examples of how varied puzzles can be is a mathematical adventure where the player has to "use a probability function to cross a field of improbability to get to a vortex." Sadly the article was never finished, although remnants of it can be found in the ADV.DOC file. I started thinking more and more about a mathematically abstract adventure, and Tesseract was born!

The very first adventure that I wrote was in 1982, titled "Hall of the Mountain King" (find the Crystal of Light). Tesseract Version 1.0 was the second of the three TRS-80 BASIC adventures that I wrote in a two-month adventure-frenzy during the summer of 1983. The first was "Project Triad" (defuse the bomb on the space station), and the third was "Codename Intrepid" (deliver a package to another agent).