Game Classification

Eamon, (AKA The Wonderful World of Eamon) was one of the earliest role-playing games available for the Apple II. It was also perhaps the first ever adventure game construction set.

The game was public domain, so it was mainly distributed in Apple user groups and by trading with friends. The main game consisted of the Eamon Master disk, which had the Main Hall and a short adventure called the Beginner's Cave.

You started the game in the Main Hall, where you created a new character or selected an old character. Then you could buy weapons, spells, and armor and go on your adventure. Weapons came in five different types: Axe, Bow, Mace, Spear, and Sword. There were three types of armor: Leather, Chain, and Plate. There were several spells: Blast, a damage spell, Power, which had random effects, Heal, which healed you, and Speed, which increased your chance to hit.

Character development was fairly simple. Your character started with random stats in three categories: Hardiness (how much you could carry and the amount of damage you could take), Agility (How good you were in combat) and Charisma (Affected the costs of items in the store and the friendliness of monsters). You also had percentage ratings for each of the weapon types that determined, along with the armor penalty, whether you could hit or not. These percentage ratings had a chance of going up every time you hit a monster with that type of weapon.

The game was almost entirely text-based. There were a few adventures that made use of graphics, but they were the exception rather than the rule. You interacted with your environment using simple one or two-word adventure game commands such as ATTACK RAT, INVENTORY, or NORTH. There was no option to save your game in most of the adventures, so death was often quick, sudden, and final.

Since Eamon was in the public domain, other people started writing their own adventures with the Eamon Dungeon Designer disk. You could make a good hack-and-slash adventure in an afternoon or two or you could spend lots of time writing modifications and special effects into your game by adding to the main game program, which was written in Applesoft BASIC. Over 240 adventures were written for the Eamon system, with themes running from fantasy to mystery to movie knock-offs (one of my favorites was the Quest for the Holy Grail).

The Eamon game was expanded over the years to include more sophisticated inventory management, shortened commands, and better monster handling. A commercial version was sold for a while and an expanded and more sophisticated version of Eamon called Swordthrust was developed by Donald Brown, but it never enjoyed the success of it's predecessor. [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : Apple II - Atari ST - PC (Dos)

Links

• http://www.mobygames.com/game/eamon/