Eamon
"EAMON is a computerized version of what are called 'Fantasy Role-Playing Games.' When you enter the universe of one of these games, you are no longer John (or Jane) Smith, mild-mannered computer hobbyist. Instead, you become a character in a land of adventure, doing almost anything you want to." (Quoted from the Eamon manual)
Eamon is a kind of text adventure system with strong elements of role-playing. It is special in that there are many different games using a common standard, so that it is possible to use the same character in several games. Abilities and some weapons can be brought over from one game to another.
There is no standard background in the Eamon world. One game may involve fighting dragons and orcs with swords and magic. Another may be a Science Fiction adventure with space ships and blazing laser guns. Another quote from the manual:
"Far away, at the dead center of the Milky Way, is the planet of Eamon. It doesn't orbit any suns--all of the suns orbit it. The shifting pulls of all of these great bodies bring strange forces to bear upon this planet; twisting light, tides, even the laws of science itself! Strange things happen there, and the citizens of Eamon must always be adaptable, for things are rarely what they seem, and even more rarely what they were yesterday!"
Eamon was originally created in 1980 by Donald Brown and further developed by John Nelson and Tom Zuchowski. The system quickly gained a devoted fan following, and during the years, well over 200 games have been written for it by dozens of different writers.
Brown says about the origin of the game's name: "I had a dictionary, one of those huge ones with a thesaurus, mini encyclopedia, and at the end was a list of names. I opened that section, put my finger down, and it landed on Eamon. It wasn't for several years later that I learned I'd been pronouncing it wrong--I've pronounced it 'Eee-ah-mon', but I was told it's actually 'eh-mon'. I still usually use my old pronunciation, and say that's how the planet's name is pronounced, no matter how the people's names are pronounced."
Eamon has been converted from the original Apple II version to Atari ST, Atari 800 (Beginner's Cave only) and MS-DOS. A conversion to Commodore 64 evolved into an entirely new game entitled Imagery!.
News! (May, 1999) John Nelson is still working on converting the original Eamon games to MS-DOS. Many of those will soon be made available from this site. Watch this space for further announcements! If you want to help converting more games to MS-DOS, please contact John Nelson, address below.
There are at least two on-line groups for discussion of Eamon. The most popular is the USENET group alt.games.eamon. If this is not distributed to your site, contact your news administrator immediately! (Or read alt.games.eamon through Google.)
You may also want to try the MSN group Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online.
Brown, Donald, 1980, "The Wonderful World of Eamon", Recreational Computing Vol. 9 No. 1 Issue 46, 32-43.