Re: Eamon Adventure Browser "AKA" Eamon Revolutions
Direct from the Player's Manual :
1.1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF EAMON: DONALD BROWN, JOHN NELSON, AND THE NEUC
Eamon is one of the oldest computer role-playing gaming systems in history and certainly the most enduring. As I write this, Eamon is now about thirty years old and the gaming formula is still unique and going strong with new adventures being developed and distributed within an active online community.
The original version (hereafter referred to as "Classic Eamon", "vanilla Eamon" or simply just "Eamon") was developed in the early 1980's by a man named Donald Brown. Don created a system that consisted of a master floppy disk (with the Main Hall and Beginner's Cave on it) where one could store characters they had created, carry out common transactions, and be launched into a multitude of adventure settings and scenarios. Each Eamon adventure was a separate floppy disk (or disks) with a database of rooms, monsters, treasure, etc..
Brown did an excellent job of simplifying complex paper and pencil RPGs (like "Dungeons & Dragons") and integrating that genre with the popular "adventure game" style (which tends to focus on puzzle solving, ignoring character development). The result was a unique gaming formula with open-ended development possibilities that made it highly appealing to both gamers and game designers alike. The name "Eamon" (commonly pronounced "E-MUN") was reportedly picked by Brown, at random, from a nearby Irish dictionary during development.
Eamon was released into the public domain as non-commercial software and Brown encouraged people to do whatever they wished with it. Brown himself wrote the master Main Hall disk, a few manuals and utilities for creating adventures, and eight adventures that showed off a variety of ways that Eamon could be expanded. He went as far as including examples of adding sound effects and even a graphic interface before completely leaving the Eamon world, never to be heard from again.
After Brown's departure, the Eamon reins were taken up by a fellow Des Moines, Iowa resident and computer store patron named John Nelson. Nelson started the National Eamon Users Club (NEUC) and personally continued development of the vanilla Eamon system using Brown's original formulas and source code.
The NEUC assigned official numbers to each adventure created for the Eamon library, which soon included over one hundred entries, and a produced a semi-regular newsletter. Nelson's development contributions included bug fixes, slight expansion of the master disk programs and a new set of utilities. Nelson, who contributed eighteen original adventures of his own to the library, standardized the base system to automate such things as doors, healing potions, and the level of light in rooms.
1.2 A BRIEF HISTORY OF EAMON: THOMAS ZUCHOWSKI AND THE EAG
Eventually Nelson started focusing on porting Eamon to the PC and his Apple II Eamon involvement, along with the NEUC newsletter, became increasingly sparse and sporadic. Finally, in a desperate act of preservation, a club member named Thomas Zuchowski "continually nagged" Nelson until he finally agreed to turn over control of the NEUC library, membership records and remaining funds.
Tom, who had previously authored several high quality adventures (as well as the popular character editor program that is included on the NEUC's Main Hall distributions), successfully resuscitated the club. Renaming it to "The Eamon Adventurer's Guild", Tom created a professional base for Eamon fans with a regular newsletter that would continue for fifteen years! Tom also personally continued to develop the Eamon system; using a mixture of Brown's formulas and his own, he redesigned the database and main adventure programs to be more efficient and take up less disk space, considerably increasing the speed at which the system loaded and ran. Among other improvements, Tom also updated the manuals, made the player interface more friendly, and continued the automation of handling certain item types (including a standard system for armor and other "wearable" items).
1.3 A BRIEF HISTORY OF EAMON: MATTHEW CLARK AND THE EAG WEBSITE
Interest in Eamon had waned considerably by 2001 and development of new adventures appeared to be coming to a halt, so Tom Zuchowski started procedures to officially shut the Eamon Adventurer's Guild down. By 2005 Tom permanently left the scene, passing control to a man named Matthew Clark. Matt had already spent several years building and maintaining the official Eamon Adventurer's Guild website and also authored a high quality Eamon adventure of his own.
As of the last count, there are 258 adventures written for the Classic Eamon system, as well as multiple utilities and customized Main Hall disks. There are also multiple cross-platform Eamon ports and "cousins."
Known Apple II based systems derived from Eamon are: Super Eamon, Eamon Pro, Eamon II, KnightQuest and Donald Brown's own commercial Eamon clone, the SwordThrust series. The known cross-platform attempts over the years include ports of Eamon to the Atari 5200, Atari ST, Commodore 64 (under the name "Imagery!") and several MS-DOS renditions. Strangely enough, there was no known port of Eamon for the Apple II's successor, the Macintosh, until 2012 when Eamon Deluxe 5.0 was released as a cross-platform system.
Currently, all versions of Eamon can be downloaded from Matthew Clark's Official Eamon Adventurer's Guild website: www.eamonAG.org. The Guild website is the largest Eamon resource in the world and is also the official home of Eamon Deluxe 5.0: www.eamonAG.org/pages/eamondx.htm.
This concludes the "brief" history of Eamon, a system which, after thirty years among the world of computer gaming, is still too unique to be easily explained or described. Cheers to those thirty years, to everyone who has been involved with Eamon, to the modern release of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 and to the next thirty years of Eamon gaming.
-Frank Black
September, 2012
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