Send in the Clones

A new text adventure for the Tatung Einstein by L. Boffin, set in the world of Paranoia, the tabletop role playing game of the mid 1980s. You are a Red level troubleshooter in Alpha Complex, an underground city run by the paranoid Friend Computer, where almost everything is treason. Your briefing arrives garbled (“Your mission is to... crackle... hiss... retrieve...”), and you have a family of eight clones to spend working out what it wants. When one dies, the next takes over and keeps what the last one carried.

In the author's words: “Imagine HAL programmed by Monty Python in a movie directed by Rob Zombie.”

Play Send in the Clones in your browser in our Online Player, with nothing to install.

Playing It

• Each clone chooses a secret society, a skill and a mutation, and they decide what it can do. Type STATUS for a reminder.
• The parser takes a verb and a noun, with a second noun or an adverb where they are needed. Some words shorten to three letters, and I and L work too.
• SAVE and RESTORE keep one saved game. At the title, 1 starts a new game and 2 continues the saved one.
• The maximum score is 210.

Running It

Boot the disc and it starts XtalDOS and runs the game by itself. In MAME use SITC.mfi: the game saves, and MAME cannot write to an Einstein .dsk. If you have not set MAME up yet, see emulating the Tatung Einstein. Or skip the setup and play it in the Online Player.

Files in the Package

Source and Updates

The game is written in C. Its source, and any later versions, are on L. Boffin's GitHub: Send_in_the_Clones_Tatung_version. The disc here is the repository's build at commit 7654266, 1 November 2026. TatungBytes tested it through five rounds before release; it can be completed for the full score, and the few small slips still known, all cosmetic, have been passed to the author.

Also by L. Boffin: 1D Life.