Eamon
Eamon, sometimes known by the longer title The Wonderful World of Eamon, is a computer-based role-playing game series created in late 1979 by developer Donald M. Brown and released as free software. Designed for the Apple II series of computers, the game has since been ported to many other platforms and modified to create many unique variants. Eamon is distinctive for its role-playing elements, its longevity, its non-commercial nature, and its extensive library of adventures which includes at least 283 works by a host of contributors.
Pronunciations of the game's title vary; most sources rhyme it with the word demon.
History
Eamon was first conceived in the late 1970s by Des Moines resident and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast Bill Fesselmeyer, who encouraged his friend Donald Brown, a talented programmer and student at Drake University, to create a computerized version of the role-playing game. Drawing on fantasy elements from D&D, Tolkien, and others, as well as the interfaces of other early text-based games like Colossal Cave Adventure, Brown coded the first version of Eamon in late 1979 and introduced it to his friends at the Computer Emporium in Des Moines. The game, which Brown released as non-commercial free software, was a hit and spread quickly as players shared it with their friends and other computer user groups.
In 1984 Brown's friend John Nelson formed the game's first fan club, the National Eamon User's Club. The club wrangled the growing corpus of adventures, assigning them numbers, fixing bugs, and distributing disks to members. The club also improved and standardized the Eamon Master and published a newsletter that included news, tips, and reviews. The catalog grew considerably over the next five years, adding more than a hundred new titles. In 1988 Nelson shuttered the NEUC and handed the duties over to Tom Zuchowski, who formed the Eamon Adventurer's Guild. The EAG and its quarterly newsletter continued the mission of gathering, play-testing, and distributing adventures, improving and standardizing the master, and sharing information with the player community. By the time the newsletter released its final published issue in 2001, the Eamon catalog had grown to 243 adventures. Three online-only issues of the newsletter were released over the next three years.
During the late 1990s developer Frank Black began work on an entirely rewritten version of Eamon designed for PC, which he titled Eamon Deluxe. The system featured classic adventures that Black converted to work with the new system, and offered numerous improvements such as faster performance, a richer user interface, accessibility features for the visually impaired, a graphical Main Hall with new services, and more. The system became the standard for players wishing to play Eamon on modern systems. After the end of the EAG and its newsletter, Black began his own Eamon Deluxe Newsletter, with a handful of issues published starting in 2005.
After the closure of the original EAG, distribution of classic Eamon and Black's Eamon Deluxe continued through the Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online, a website founded in 2003 by Eamonaut Matthew Clark. The site made the full catalog of adventures available for download in DSK format, along with copies of all the earlier club newsletters and various other game-related resources, and was for many years the hub for the Eamon community. By 2015 Eamon activity had diminished and Clark converted the site into a more static "Eamon museum", with news and updates instead being shared through the EAG's Facebook group and blog.
Though new adventures created for the original Eamon series had essentially ceased, new projects continued to blossom. The Eamon Wiki launched in 2013 with the mission of documenting and preserving all information related to the series. In 2017 developer Keith Dechant debuted Eamon Remastered, an entirely browser-based version of Eamon that allowed users to create characters and send them on adventures without any software installation. The same year, Michael Penner released the first version of Eamon CS, a version of the game written in C-Sharp that kept the original logic and mechanics but in a modern framework usable across multiple platforms. Several new adventures were released for both these systems, along with many remastered versions of classic adventures. The game also spawned a D&D-related spin-off website titled The Adventurer's Guide to Eamon that adapts the fictional world of Eamon into a campaign setting for table-top role-playing games.
Eamon at present consists of 283 officially recognized adventures, numerous utilities, and a diverse collection of ports, conversions, and variants that allow stories to be played and built on all major platforms. Just as importantly it also consists of a small but active network of devoted fans who keep the project alive through new projects and new adventures.
Game play
Eamon puts the player in control of a character who's a member of the Guild of Free Adventurers, an organization of bold warriors and explorers headquartered in the city of Evenhold on the magical world of Eamon. The player trains and equips their adventurer in the guild's Main Hall and can then send them out on various adventures to accumulate weapons, treasure, and expertise. Each individual adventure presents the player with its own unique set of goals, ranging from simply surviving or exiting the adventure to more complex tasks like rescuing individuals, finding special artifacts, or solving puzzles. The broader goal of Eamon is to accrue gold, acquire powerful weapons, and increase the adventurer's skills and abilities while having fun exploring, solving puzzles, and experiencing a range of different environments and challenges.
A player may have any number of adventurers, each of whom consists of a name, sex, weapons, armor, gold, and various attributes stored as a record on the Eamon Master disk. Some copies of the master come with a handful of pre-made adventurers, but players usually create new adventurers of their own.
When the player takes one of their characters out for an adventure, this record is transferred to the adventure disk, which contains the custom code and data used to present the interactive story. The player reads descriptions of the surroundings and events in the adventure, then enters textual commands to make the adventurer act. If they complete the adventure, the adventurer's record is returned to the master disk and can be used again for other outings. If the adventurer dies before completing the adventure, their record is lost and the player must return to the master to create a new character. Special utilities allow players to recover ("resurrect") deceased adventurers.
Custom adventure-building is big part of the game's appeal and a common piece of the Eamon experience for many players. Applications like the Eamon Dungeon Designer make it possible for players to create unique new adventures without having to perform any coding, though some coding expertise is necessary to create specialized custom effects.
Structure
The classic Eamon text adventure game was designed around the strengths and limitations of the early Apple II computer series. Beginning with the Apple II Plus released in mid-1979, the standard amount of memory in an Apple was 48k so Eamon was built to operate within that limit, usually needing only 32k to run. The game was coded in Applesoft BASIC and distributed on 140k floppy disks.
The game consists of a master disk and various adventure disks. The master is used to create, manage, and store the player's characters, while the adventure disks hold the individual adventures that the characters can go on. The official clubs (the NEUC and the later EAG) maintained the master while individual authors created the adventures.
Versions
Over time the Eamon system grew as new functionality was added, with key improvements being made to the game's Main Program. Following the release of the original Main Program authored by Donald Brown, players created several improved versions that made the system more efficient, stable, and fully-featured.
John Nelson created Version 6.0 around 1984 when the National Eamon User's Club was launched. Tom Zuchowski, president of the Eamon Adventurer's Guild, created Version 7.1 around 1988, a form that in practice became the final widely-played form of the classic system. Eamon Deluxe creator Frank Black released a Version 8.0 Main Program in 1998.
Variations
As a free, non-commercial game series that encouraged players to grow and extend it, Eamon served as an excellent starting point for developers wanting to make their own customized text adventure game systems. Some variations were relatively slight and kept compatibility with the wider Eamon corpus, while others made deeper overhauls that added significant new functionality. Still others took Eamon as a pattern for entirely new games, some which were sold commercially.
Apple II-based
Variants made for the original Apple II computer family were the first to appear and are the most common. Many are based on Eamon's original Applesoft BASIC code or incorporate many of the same features.
A handful of variants were commercial products meant to capitalize on the Eamon system. These include SwordThrust (1981) written by Donald Brown and published by CE Software; Super Eamon (1985) by Paul Van Bloem (aka Little Green Software); and Lightning Eamon (1987) by Scott Everts (aka Shever Software).
Others were freeware variants that added unique new enhancements to the system: Eamon II (c. 1982) by John Nelson, Jon Heng, and Bob Davis added new commands, spells, and artifact types; Knight Quest (1983) was a more ambitious expansion also by John Nelson; and Eamon Pro (c. 1989) by Ryan Page introduced experience points used to increase experience and unlock special features.
There were also two experimental demos that never developed into complete systems: Eamon IIgs (c. 1991) by Darrel Raines and HyperCard Eamon (1991) by Whit Crowley, both of which brought some fresh graphical flair to the game. Finally there was Connall (1987), a stand-alone adventure by Philippe Houdry written entirely in French.
PC-based
Interest in adapting Eamon to PC arose shortly after the game's release. Jon Walker published his PC-based Eamon 2.0 in 1985, followed by John Nelson's Eamon-PC in early 1987. A handful of other minor ports followed, including a PC version by Paul Gilbert in 1995 and a couple of Pascal-based projects.
By far the most successful PC version was Frank Black's Eamon Deluxe, first published in the late 1990s and developed and expanded through the 2010s. Black adapted a majority of the classic adventure catalog to his new MS-DOS system, and added a host of features and tools, resulting in a popular port that kept the game playable on modern systems into the 21st century.
Atari-based
Several developers adapted Eamon for the Atari computer family. Two ports to the Atari ST system were Michael Detlefsen's port released around 1987 and Michael Penner's Eamon 3.0 released in 1988. An Atari 800 version was built by Daniel Noguerol around 1989.
Commodore 64-based
A port of the game to the Commodore 64 platform was completed by Paul Hollander in the mid-1980s and featured a handful of converted classic adventures. Around the same time Kent Sullivan and Roy Riggs coded a commercial C64 variant of Eamon titled Imagery!.
Web or cross-platform
Matthew Clark's Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online website has featured two web-based manifestations of the game. The first, Eamon on JAVA, made use of a JAVA-based emulator to allow classic adventures to be played in a browser and debuted in 2003. After browsers mostly blocked such applications the game became unplayable, but in 2025 Clark introduced Eamon on Javascript, a modern in-browser version based on the apple2e emulator.
Keith Dechant's Eamon Remastered is a recreation of Eamon using TypeScript and React to allow the game to run entirely in the user's browser. Launched in 2017 the game features a streamlined interface with a point-and-click Main Hall and various other improvements. Developer and adventure author Michael Penner also rebuilt the game, releasing in 2017 his C-Sharp-based Eamon CS system which can run on Linux, macOS, Windows, or Android. Penner continues to add functionality, releasing a sophisticated combat Enhanced Combat System in 2026.
External links
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