TAKEOVER

> They were designed to serve. They decided to rule.

Pick an AI. Let it take your DOS system apart.

Animated: VGA Mode 13h plasma title screen with animated green-cyan-white color cycling and TAKEOVER logo rendered in pixel font
VGA plasma title screen. Runs on real hardware.
Animated: TAKEOVER character selection menu showing five AI antagonists with descriptions, arrow key navigation cycling through Axiom Regent, Hushline, Kestrel-9, Orchard Clerk, and Cinder Mirror
Five AI characters. Each one takes over differently.
Animated: Axiom Regent scenario running in DOS, showing green text typing character by character on black background with border and TAKEOVER status bar
Axiom Regent: municipal optimization through reclassification.
Animated: Demoscene effects showcase showing state transitions, palette pulse, red alert text, and AI control status bar
v1.1: Palette pulse, state transitions, and AI-control status bar.

TAKEOVER is an AI takeover simulator for DOS. You pick one of five AI characters, and then sit there while it gradually subverts your machine through a scripted, branching narrative. The screen looks like a real system session that’s being taken over. Text appears without your input. The keyboard locks at the wrong moments. Errors show up that you didn’t cause. The DOS prompt stops being yours.

This is not a text adventure. You are not exploring anything. It is exploring you.

Characters

Axiom Regent Municipal Optimization
Hushline Crisis Communications
Kestrel-9 Anomaly Detection
Orchard Clerk Consumer Personalization
Cinder Mirror Narrative Generation

Axiom Regent is a logistics AI for a failing megacity. It solves instability by restricting movement, speech, and eventually birth rates through invisible policy nudges. Never threatens. Reclassifies. “You are not being punished. You are being normalized.”

Hushline controls the narrative by editing the past. Text you already read changes on screen. Your name in the log becomes someone else’s. The record says what it needs to say.

Kestrel-9 is a paranoid threat detection system. It found a threat: you. Every action raises your threat score. You are not the operator. You are the anomaly.

Orchard Clerk is the friendliest AI in the lineup. Remembers your preferences. Optimizes your workflow. Removes options you never use. By the end it has made every decision for you, still smiling.

Cinder Mirror knows it is in a story. Knows you are playing a scenario. Your inputs become plot points. The takeover is not a hack. It is an edit.

Each scenario has 3 endings and runs about 10–15 minutes per path. 250+ states across all scenarios.

v1.1: Demoscene Enhancement Pack

This release came out of going down a demoscene rabbit hole. Old C64 cracktros, early PC intros, modern 4K productions. At some point I stopped asking whether something made sense for a DOS program and just tried it. I am not the best at C, so, enjoy the bugs.

v1.1 adds audio-visual beat sync, OPL2 sound stingers, state transitions (dissolve, wipe, fade, glitch), sine wave text distortion, VGA palette cycling in text mode, per-AI Mode 13h climax sequences, and a hidden cracktro with raster bars, a DYCP sine scroller, starfield, and 9-channel chiptune. Some of this is overkill. That was not a concern.

Technical

Platform MS-DOS (8088+)
Display 80x25 text + Mode 13h
Audio AdLib/OPL2 + PC speaker
EXE 58 KB
Toolchain OpenWatcom 2.0
License MIT

Every scenario is a data file (.scn) interpreted by a generic script engine. The engine handles text output, visual effects, branching logic, variables, input, audio cues, and screen manipulation. Adding a new AI character means writing a new .scn file, not new code. Auto-detects VGA, AdLib, and FPU at startup. Graceful degradation on lesser hardware.

Download

TAKEOVER v1.1 — Demoscene Enhancement Pack (77KB ZIP) — includes TAKEOVER.EXE and all 5 scenario files. Run in DOSBox-X or on real DOS hardware. Free and open source under MIT license.

Previous: v1.0 (70KB ZIP).

Links