Escher Interactive (1996): The CD-ROM Multimedia Encyclopedia of M.C. Escher's Art and Puzzles

Rating band: Fan-favorite · Year: 1996 · Developer: Eyeware Interactive · Publisher: Byron Preiss Multimedia · Platform: Windows 95/98 · Theme: Modern

Strategy Plus called Escher Interactive “a comprehensive look at the life and works of this extraordinary personage,” and that description holds up: this is a CD-ROM built to be walked through rather than played in any conventional sense. The bulk of the disc is a Gallery section covering the whole of Escher’s graphic output, browsable chronologically or by search term, with images that zoom in far enough to inspect the fine detail his tessellation work depended on.

Two modules go further than simple browsing. The Tessellation Workshop lets you take a single piece of one of Escher’s symmetry drawings and distort, recolor, and rearrange it into something of your own. It’s genuinely engrossing for a while, though the effect wears thin once you’ve worked through the images the disc actually provides. A Spheres module applies a similar distortion effect (the kind produced by placing a spherical lens over a flat image) across ten of his pictures, and a Morphing module lets you watch one Escher form gradually transform into another.

Then there’s the stranger material. Several “Magic Picture” stereograms hide encrypted 3D Escher figures inside fields of colored static, the kind of image some viewers can resolve instantly and others never quite manage, and the disc leans into that unevenness rather than pretending it’s a universal effect. Six animated sequences extrapolate motion out of Escher works that were never meant to move, which is either the disc’s most inventive idea or its strangest, depending on how you feel about animating a print artist’s still compositions.

The two puzzle activities, Convex/Concave and Impossible Puzzles, are the closest thing to conventional gameplay here. Convex/Concave, named for an actual Escher print, has you racing a timer to judge whether a space reads as concave or convex and place objects accordingly; there’s no real win condition, just a running score, which is a deliberately loose structure for players used to clearer objectives. Impossible Puzzles asks you to assemble disconnected 3D shapes into a target model, and despite the name, the designers maintain every one is solvable.

None of this hides the disc’s real limitation, which its own reviewer named plainly: entertainment value here is short-term. Once you’ve explored the provided material, there isn’t much left to discover, and the fair comparison is closer to a multimedia coffee-table book than a game with lasting replay value. That’s not really a knock against it so much as an honest description of what kind of product it is.

How to run it today

Escher Interactive is a Windows 95/98 CD-ROM title, not a DOS program, so it needs a period-accurate Windows environment rather than DOSBox. A Windows 9x virtual machine (86Box or an older VirtualBox install) is the more reliable route. If it’s installed anywhere other than C:\ESCHER, remember to copy ESCHER.INI into the Windows folder and edit the paths inside it manually. The disc’s own documentation flags this as a required step, not an optional one.

Compatibility: Windows 95/98 (via a period Windows virtual machine) · Controls: Mouse-driven · Setup difficulty: Medium

Legal status

Byron Preiss Multimedia, the publisher, is no longer an active company, and developer Eyeware Interactive has left no visible trail either. There’s no confirmed party currently maintaining or distributing this specific CD-ROM. Escher’s actual artwork continues to be managed elsewhere by parties unrelated to this old software package, but that’s a separate matter from whether anyone holds or enforces rights over the disc itself — and on that narrower question, the honest answer is that it’s genuinely unclear.

If you liked this, try

DinoPark Tycoon (another 90s CD-ROM built around exploration and creation rather than combat), The Incredible Machine (a design-tool game built on physical puzzle logic), and Coaster (Disney’s CD-ROM design tool for building your own roller coasters).