Triforce for Mac

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Triforce is an original metagame by Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Boluk that maps the two-dimensional spaces of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda onto three-dimensional typologies: cylinders, spheres, toruses, and Möbius strips.

Full description

In The Legend of Zelda, there are two locations that explicitly defy the logic of the Cartesian grid: The Lost Woods and The Lost Hills. When traveling through these single-screen mazes, Link finds himself endlessly looping, temporarily arrested by a classic gaming trope. Like Asteroids and Pac-Man, if the player’s avatar exits the edge of the screen, it seems to appear on the opposite side as if teleported from one side of the screen to the other—a counter rolls over from 255 to 0. The mathematical certainty and programmatic simplicity of The Lost Woods and The Lost Hills generates complex and sometimes paradoxical topologies. Whether the player realizes it or not, each looping space maps not to the flattened grid on which the rest of Hyrule is organized, but instead to the three-dimensional topology of a torus. Triforce is an original piece of software that explores the topology of The Legend of Zelda by visualizing the 8-bit game in three dimensions.

Triforce begins with Link standing in a miniature version of Hyrule based on a reconstructed version of Nintendo’s original overworld. While avoiding enemy Octorocks and navigating the top-down 2D space, Link can collect his trusty sword and start spelunking different cave systems. Wise women present the pixelated hero with riddles that relate to 3D versions of The Lost Woods and The Lost Hills, now rendered as donuts hovering above the well-known fantasy landscape. After looping from left to right and wrapping around these reconfigured landscapes, Link must explore three different color dungeons to find and recombine three pieces of a mythical artifact: the triforce.

To play the game, first download and extract the files from the .DMG for (for Mac) or .ZIP (for PC). Then double click the .APP or .EXE to launch the Triforce’s preference panel. Select your preferred resolution, quality, and input options then press "Play!"

Default Controls: Press Space to Begin Press Esc to Exit WASD to Move Arrows to Rotate Space to Attack

Download file “_Triforce_ for Mac”
  • type
    File
  • created on
  • file format
    dmg
  • file size
    19 MB
  • copyright status
    Fair Use
  • creator
    Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
  • credit
    Graphics and sounds adapted from The Legend of Zelda (1985) by Nintendo.
  • rights
    CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
  • rights holder
    Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux