I Am an Insane Rogue AI

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

I Am An Insane Rogue AI is a browser-based game made by "Nerdook" and available on gaming site Kongregate. You play as an insane rogue AI that has decided to Take Over the World by hacking the mainframes of various facilities all around the globe.

It plays like a puzzle game: Each facility has a mainframe, some computer terminals, and several researchers and engineers. To hack the mainframe you must take control of all the terminals in the facility, but the researchers can fix them. You can at first only lock the doors and turn on and off the lights to scare them or ring phones to distract them from the computers. The engineers can repair the lights and unlock doors, but not fix the computers. Then robots are added and later turrets, which you can turn to your murderous purpose. Security agents can fix the computers and fight the robots, then there are the elites, a group of people with various extra abilities. Every action (locking doors, hacking drones and computers...) costs a number of "processing cycles": if the AI reaches zero a countdown will start, and if you can't gain any more by the end of it the level will end. Cycles can be gained by successfully hacking a computer and by murdering people.

Despite having been released only a few weeks before the time of this writing Released in January 2011, the game was already been played over a million times within a few weeks. Try it here.

Tropes used in I Am an Insane Rogue AI include:
  • AcCENT Upon the Wrong SylLABle: Well, the AI was inspired partly by GLaDOS...
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Game.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The normal computers and the drones' sensors are green, and turn red when the A.I. hacks them. This is useful when Elites who can fix the drones appear.
  • Crush! Kill! Destroy!: The AI says this very phrase sometimes.
  • Don't Try This At Home: "...unless you are also a insane rogue program."
  • Elite Mooks: The Elites.
  • Eyepatch of Power: The Warlord, one of the Elites, has one.
  • Instant Awesome, Just Add Ninja: Ninja that can teleport and are hackers! How cool is that?
  • Machine Monotone: The A.I. is fully voiced at the beginning of every stage. However, "monotone" is not always the case, due to the somewhat glitchy voice.
  • Magical Computer: Controlling the phone lines and the fire extinguishing system is plausible. Summoning killer drones and a killer cyborg? Not so much.
  • McNinja: The Ninja comes from Central Asia.
  • Multinational Team: The five elites from the higher difficulty levels all come from a different part of the world. The Elite Hacker is from Russia, the Warlord from Africa, the Ninja from Central Asia, the Secret Agent from Europe and the Spec Ops member from Canada.
  • No Waterproofing in the Future: We're far enough in the future to have AI, but I can still short stuff out by taking over the sprinklers? Right.
  • Pacifist Run: Actually, it usually gets you more money than a murderous run, both from the bonuses and from the fact that it's easier to chain together massive combos when there's people around.
  • Palette Swap: The Killer Cyborg is a swap of the Special Ops Soldier.
  • Percussive Maintenance: The Elite Hacker can "counter-hack" the terminals you've suborned, which apparently means smashing them up.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Rogue AI has a very Hal-esque red eye.
  • Rule of Fun
  • Shout-Out: The developer says in the notes that the AI has been inspired by other famous rogue AIs such as HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, System Shock‍'‍s SHODAN, Portal‍'‍s GLaDOS, Skynet from The Terminator and WOPR of WarGames. Specific references to them include:
    • SHODAN: The same loathing of humans and all organic lifeforms, and sometimes its stuttering speech pattern.
    • HAL: The A.I. has his iconic red "eye"/sensor and the achievements page is made to look like his memory banks.
    • GLaDOS: The A.I. has a similarly dark sense of humour, and with upgrades can release a deadly neurotoxin and clear a floor with "portal technology", represented by two swirling portals - one blue and one orange, naturally. There's a cake sitting between them. (It doesn't look like that cake, though.)
      • As a reference to both of them, the AI will occasionally say "If I sing to them, maybe it will calm them down." "Daisy, Daisy" or "Still Alive", perhaps?
    • Other shout outs include:
  • Sweat Drop: Displayed by panicking researchers and mechanics, and also others rushing to stop you hacking a terminal.
  • Take Over the World: What you do if you win in a mostly peaceful fashion.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: "Your computer has not not yet been compromised. I promise!"
  • Video Game Caring Potential and Video Game Cruelty Potential: The levels can be completed without having to harm a single human, or by brutally murdering everyone inside the facilities, and the various upgrades are pretty helpful for doing just that. There are game achievements for both a pacifist run (also a bonus) and the slaughtering of puny humans.
    • The "Caring" potential is kind of limited, however; at best you're just not killing them, just scaring them out of their wits.
  • Villain Protagonist
  • A Winner Is You: The ending is somewhat disappointing. If you have more Pacifist completions, a different computer voice recounts that the company created an AI in 2012 which took over the world, achieving complete world domination by 2025. Slightly more satisfying if you swung more towards violence: it says that two years after the AI's takeover, every human was dead.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: One of the upgrades from late in the game is a toxin that turns every dead human in a zombie who, in turn, attacks other people.
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