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Retro: EAMON, one of the earliest CRPGs
Fri, 11 Jul 2008

The term CRPG refers to Computer-based Role Playing Games, such as the current Oblivion, but tracing back through Eye of the Beholder and back to Temple of Apshai and so on. The earliest examples were more text based due to their mainframe origins, and later the slow transmission rates of modems. Enter EAMON .. I've not done any history lookups here but its going back to the Apple 2 days, and I experienced it on the almighty Atari ST .. so back around 1987 or so I'd guess I fiddled with the system.

As fans of "Choose Your Own Adventure" style books (Steve Jackson ftw!), my brother was an aspiring adventure author at the time, putting together little adventure novellas on pads of paper. (You number each page, and at the end of a given page you have options that give you page numbers to turn to should you take that action. The pages are randomized to make it hard to guess where a given series of actoins may lead. Ultimately there are numerous plot endings, but usually more than a few times your character gets killed along the way, forcing you to re-start. Fun stuff.) I remember going through the Public Domain archives of local groups, and through BBS file listings all over the province (racking up huge bills all the time through long distnace charges), trying to find (well, to be honest, pirated games) some adventure authoring tools for him. There were a few systems, including EAMON, but they were just too complicated for us. Still, I remember playing a few EAMON games.

Well, t'other day I stumbled across EAMON Deluxe, a port of the EAMON system to DOS a decade back. The beauty of this is that you can still run it today on your modern PC (and hopefully someday he'll release the source so that it can be brought to Mac, Linux and so forth.) You could always fire up an emulator (Atari ST, Apple 2, C64 and so on) and play the games there but this makes things pretty easy.

Further, the lad has pulled all the many EAMON adventures together into a big archive, including user supplied reviews of the adventures. Now, I should note that EAMON was not a game.. it was a system, supplied with a few simple text adventure games. But the author supplied tools to make your own adventures and many did.. so there are literally hundreds of additional goofy little text adventures. (These are of different style than the pure "IF" Interactive Fiction games I've gone on about before; those are pure adventure games with no dice rolling, no skills per se and include such classics as Zork or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. EAMON is one of the first CRPGs, in that you play a character who increases in powers and gold and gear and so on over playtime, and also is a less lofty academic pursuit; the EAMON gamelets are not novellas in adventure form, but early examples of kill-and-loot games.) Fun for short bursts, which hits a certain spot in my heart.

One facet of the system I admire is this .. you have a character and you pick an adventure to play through; the character persists between adventure gamelets.. so while you might be in a fantasy gamelet (the majority) one time, the next could be sci-fi. The EAMON system defines the system, and suggests certain damage levels.. so while a new player might have 20 hit points before dieing, a slight damage hit is 1 damage, while a heavier stroke is 2 or 3 points, say. So you take your character including gear game to game and grow him over the lifespan, regardless of the actual adventure the character is in.

That is pretty ahead of its time.

Anyway, if you want to try a quck text hack and slash game, that plays and feels like a light text adventure, and definately hardcore retro.. EAMON could be just the thing.

I may just have to look around for some source.. porting this to a handheld could rock my socks :)

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