Eamon (video game)
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''Eamon'', sometimes known as ''The Wonderful World of Eamon'', is a
game creation system A game creation system (GCS) is a consumer-targeted game engine and a set of specialized design tools (and sometimes a light scripting language), engineered for the rapid iteration of user-derived video games. Examples include Novashell and Pie i ...
and a
role-playing Role-playing or roleplaying is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' offers a definition of role-playing a ...
adventure game series created by Donald Brown and released for the Apple II in 1980. The game is a
text adventure '' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...
similar to other early titles like ''
Adventure An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme ...
'' (1976) or ''
Zork ''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded a ...
'' (1980) and to later text-based multi-user dungeons (MUDs), though with many
role-playing Role-playing or roleplaying is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' offers a definition of role-playing a ...
elements not available in other interactive fiction. ''Eamon'' software is non-commercial and is freely available in the
public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...
.


Premise

''Eamon'' casts the player in the role of a free-wheeling
fantasy Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore. Its roots are in oral traditions, which then became fantasy literature and d ...
adventurer who undertakes dangerous quests against numerous enemies to earn riches and experience. Home base is the Guild of Free Adventurers, an association of heroes on the mystical world of Eamon, a vaguely
Medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
place awash in
magic Magic or Magick most commonly refers to: * Magic (supernatural), beliefs and actions employed to influence supernatural beings and forces * Ceremonial magic, encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic * Magical thinking, the belief that unrela ...
and populated with strange creatures. Most adventures take place in the dungeons, castles and forests of Eamon, though some occur on other worlds or in different eras. Eamon creator Donald Brown described Eamon as "a world at the center of another galaxy—instead of revolving around any star, all of the stars revolve around it! Those huge bodies exert strange effects on the world of Eamon, bending light, gravity, time, even the laws of nature themselves!" Though influenced by such fantasy environments as ''
Dungeons & Dragons ''Dungeons & Dragons'' (commonly abbreviated as ''D&D'' or ''DnD'') is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TS ...
'' and ''
The Lord of the Rings ''The Lord of the Rings'' is an epic high-fantasy novel by English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, intended to be Earth at some time in the distant past, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's b ...
'', ''Eamon'' generally avoids stories, situations or other game elements that are particularly serious or complex, instead seeking to create an engaging, genial mood through quick play and in-jokes. Individual adventures, created by a wide range of authors, vary from the artful to the campy. The game's splash page (see infobox) uses the same image used for the title screen of the
Robert Clardy Robert Clardy (born ) is an American college football coach. He is the head football coach for Southwest Baptist University; a position he has held since 2015. He was an assistant coach for Southwest Baptist for the previous seven seasons. He ...
game, '' Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure''.


Gameplay

Brown encouraged players to modify and add to ''Eamon'', and published technical information on the game to assist them. ''Eamon'' is notable for being one of the first adventure games designed to be modular, with
expansion pack An expansion pack, expansion set, supplement, or simply expansion is an addition to an existing role-playing game, tabletop game, video game or collectible card game. These add-ons usually add new game areas, weapons, objects, characters, or ...
s written by users forming an integral part of the game experience. A master disk called the "Main Hall" is used to manage player characters and to facilitate their transfer between individual adventures. The character retains his or her attributes and statistics from adventure to adventure, as well as up to four weapons. The game's interface is similar to that of most other text adventures — the game presents the player with descriptions of the character's surroundings, including events, artifacts, monsters and exits, then prompts the player to enter a command. These commands include such things as moving in certain directions (NORTH, EAST, UP, etc.), readying weapons, attacking, getting or dropping items, interacting with characters, casting magical spells or checking inventory.


Players

All player characters in ''Eamon'' possess a name, plus the three physical attributes of hardiness, agility and charisma in varying quantities. Hardiness affects how much a player can carry and how much damage he can both inflict and withstand. A strength of 12, for instance, allows the player to absorb 12 points of damage and lift 120 (a fictional unit of weight used in the game). Agility influences the player's success using certain weapons and avoiding attacks, while charisma determines his ability to make friends and influences the prices he pays for supplies. Common attribute values for player characters are generally between 10 and 20. Players also have varying abilities with five classes of weapons — axe, bow, club, spear or sword — expressed as a percentage. Scoring a hit in battle may increase the skill in the appropriate weapon class. An additional ability, "armor expertise", determines the extent to which the player's armor affects his chance to score a hit. The greater the expertise, the less the armor encumbers the player in combat. Players may wear leather, chain or plate armor, and can supplement this with a shield. The final set of abilities describes the player's aptitude with magic. A player can hire a wizard to teach him four magic spells: "Blast" (which damages enemies), "Heal" (which helps to restore health), "Speed" (which temporarily doubles agility) and "Power" (a spell with unpredictable results). Various other spells are sometimes available in particular adventures, but cannot be used outside them. All players begin with 200 gold pieces, which can be used to purchase weapons, armor, spells or other supplies, or can be stored in the bank. One earns more by collecting treasure during adventures. A player character may die while on an adventure, either as the result of losing a battle or from some other poor decision or mishap. Though death generally spells the end of the character and all his skills and possessions, there are utilities one can use to "resurrect" the player.


Monsters

All non-player characters in ''Eamon'', regardless of their form or disposition, are referred to as "monsters". The monsters that players must face depend on the style of the adventure and range from the conventional fantasy staples of dragons,
goblin A goblin is a small, grotesque, monstrous creature that appears in the folklore of multiple European cultures. First attested in stories from the Middle Ages, they are ascribed conflicting abilities, temperaments, and appearances depending on ...
s,
orc An Orc (or Ork) is a fictional humanoid monster like a goblin. Orcs were brought into modern usage by the fantasy writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially '' The Lord of the Rings''. In Tolkien's works, Orcs are a brutish, aggressive, ugl ...
s and wizards, to wild animals,
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s,
mummies A mummy is a dead human or an animal whose soft tissues and organs have been preserved by either intentional or accidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very low humidity, or lack of air, so that the recovered body does not decay furt ...
, ghosts, machines, other humans (both friendly and hostile) and many more. Monsters share most of the same attributes as player characters. A key exception is that monsters have "friendliness" rather than charisma, a rating that along with the encountering player's charisma determines how the monster will behave toward the player. Friendly monsters may accompany the player through the adventure and fight on the player's behalf, while unfriendly ones may ignore or attack the player. Monsters also possess a "courage" attribute that determines how likely they are to flee from combat or pursue the player.


Adventures

More than 270 individual ''Eamon'' adventures have been written by various authors to work with the ''Eamon'' system. These adventures range from very simple, 20-room outings to complex works spanning multiple diskettes. With few exceptions, each adventure stands alone and does not depend on the user completing any others. Although a majority of the adventures are
fantasy Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore. Its roots are in oral traditions, which then became fantasy literature and d ...
-themed, some adventures occupy contemporary or
science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
al settings. Most adventures include some degree of customization, adding new commands or other special game features above and beyond those included in the base ''Eamon'' program.


History

Creator Don Brown first released ''Eamon'' for non-commercial distribution on the Apple II in 1980, encouraging others to share and expand the game. All of ''Eamons fundamentals, including the original Main Hall, the first adventure design utilities and two manuals, were created by Brown, as were eight complete adventures. Brown subsequently left ''Eamon'' to develop a commercial version of the game entitled '' SwordThrust'', but users continued creating and sharing adventures for the system.


Conversion to PC

In 1985, Jon Walker from
Marshfield, Wisconsin Marshfield is a city in northwest Wood and southwest Marathon counties in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. It is located at the intersection of U.S. Highway 10, Highway 13 and Highway 97. The largest city in Wood County, its population was 18,929 at t ...
converted Eamon to the PC and released several converted and new adventures. Eventually the disks were released through various shareware organizations and garnered a minor following. While the adventures attracted some modest interest, the direct conversion of the adventure creation program prompted much criticism among PC users for being too difficult to use and poorly written (the latter in later years by people who were probably never constrained by early versions of the BASIC language). By the time a serious attempt was made to upgrade the Eamon system to Foxbase, other adventures containing graphics and real time action were becoming popular and the project was scrapped. In 1997, an attempt was made to bring Eamon to the
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; however, the project never got beyond a beta version because of the rapid pace at which the web and content distribution was developing. The original PC GW-BASIC
source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...
is almost impossible to find online anymore, and the author has only a few of the original disks archived on CD.


National Eamon User's Club

After Don Brown's departure, several ''Eamon'' enthusiasts in the
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area formed the National Eamon User's Club (NEUC) which in March 1984 released the first issue of the club newsletter, named ''Eamon Adventurer's Log''. Published by ''Eamon'' author John Nelson, this newsletter supported the game community by providing information ranging from adventure reviews to programming design help. In late 1987, the operations of the NEUC had slowed down to the point that only three newsletters were published in a two-year period. Nelson was interested in other pursuits including writing a PC version of ''Eamon''. ''Eamon'' author Thomas Zuchowski assumed the responsibility of publishing an ''Eamon'' newsletter and started the Eamon Adventurer's Guild (EAG). The NEUC shut down operations and transferred its assets to the EAG.


Eamon Adventurer's Guild

Zuchowski published the ''Eamon Adventurer's Guild Newsletter'' four times a year from June 1988 to January 2001. During this time, 94 additional games were published and the entire ''Eamon'' library was properly reviewed and documented. The last ''Eamon'' adventure to be published with the EAG was announced in December 1997. By January 2001, Zuchowski had run out of new source material for his newsletter. The last issue of the EAG newsletter was published in January 2001. Efforts were made to ensure that ''Eamon'' would not disappear. Zuchowski created the "Eamon CD" which contains the entirety of ''Eamon'' resources available at the time. This CD was made available to the members of the EAG and the general public. In April 2003, th
Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online
website officially opened. This website provides the entire archive of ''Eamon'' resources including adventures, newsletters, maps, news articles, and documentation for the system, as well as a disk image of the "Eamon CD". The existence of the website sparked a small revival in ''Eamon'' as ten new adventures have been published since the website was established.


Eamon Deluxe

In 1997, programmer
Frank Black Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV (born April 6, 1965) is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He is best known as the frontman of the alternative rock band Pixies, with whom he performs under the stage name Black Francis. F ...
began work on ''Eamon Deluxe'', an
MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...
-based conversion of ''Eamon'' designed to add various enhancements and a more user-friendly interface for adventurers and creators alike while also retaining the flavor of the original Apple game. Black converted over half of the classic ''Eamon'' adventures to the ''Eamon Deluxe'' system and announced in 2012 that version 5.0 had been sent out for testing. Version 5.0 is compatible with modern operating systems such as
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and
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using emulation software such as
DOSBox DOSBox is a free and open-source emulator which runs software for MS-DOS compatible disk operating systems—primarily video games. It was first released in 2002, when DOS technology was becoming obsolete. Its adoption for running DOS games i ...
and also includes a VI compatibility mode to make it more accessible to screen-reader programs used by visually impaired players. The converted adventures and latest updates remain non-commercial
freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...
and can be downloaded from the Eamon Adventurers Guild Online.


Eamon Remastered

In February 2017 the browser-based Eamon Remastered was released, making it possible to play Eamon online and save your progress between adventures. Currently, 39 adventures are available.


Eamon CS

In April 2017 Eamon CS was released by developer and adventure author Michael Penner. It is a version of Eamon ported to the C# programming language. It is playable on Windows, Android and Unix and continues to be developed and expanded. An iOS port is also planned.


iPhone

''Eamon'' is one of seven Apple II games included in iBasic, an iPhone app created by Beijing-based AkeySoft. As mentioned above, an iOS port of Eamon CS is also planned.


See also

* List of ''Eamon'' adventures * '' SwordThrust'', the commercial successor to ''Eamon''.


References


External links

*{{Internet Archive game, msdos_Eamon_1988, Eamon
Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online

Eamon Wiki

Eamon Remastered

Eamon CS
1980 video games 1980s interactive fiction Apple II games Atari ST games DOS games IOS games Public-domain software with source code Video games developed in the United States