Eamon

Brown encouraged players to modify and add to Eamon, and published technical information on the game to assist them. Eamon is notable for being one of the first adventure games designed to be modular, with expansion packs written by users forming an integral part of the game experience. A master disk called the "Main Hall" is used to manage player characters and to facilitate their transfer between individual adventures. The character retains his or her attributes and statistics from adventure to adventure, as well as up to four weapons.

The game's interface is similar to that of most other text adventures — the game presents the player with descriptions of the character's surroundings, including events, artifacts, monsters and exits, then prompts the player to enter a command. These commands include such things as moving in certain directions (NORTH, EAST, UP, etc.), readying weapons, attacking, getting or dropping items, interacting with characters, casting magical spells or checking inventory.

Eamon casts the player in the role of a free-wheeling fantasy adventurer who undertakes dangerous quests against numerous enemies to earn riches and experience. Home base is the Guild of Free Adventurers, an association of heroes on the mystical world of Eamon, a vaguely Medieval place awash in magic and populated with strange creatures. Most adventures take place in the dungeons, castles and forests of Eamon, though some occur on other worlds or in different eras. Eamon creator Donald Brown described Eamon as "a world at the center of another galaxy—instead of revolving around any star, all of the stars revolve around it! Those huge bodies exert strange effects on the world of Eamon, bending light, gravity, time, even the laws of nature themselves!"

Though influenced by such fantasy environments as Dungeons & Dragons and The Lord of the Rings, Eamon generally avoids stories, situations or other game elements that are particularly serious or complex, instead seeking to create an engaging, genial mood through quick play and in-jokes. Individual adventures, created by a wide range of authors, vary from the artful to the campy.

Creator Don Brown first released Eamon for non-commercial distribution on the Apple II in 1980, encouraging others to share and expand the game. All of Eamon's fundamentals, including the original Main Hall, the first adventure design utilities and two manuals, were created by Brown, as were eight complete adventures. Brown subsequently left Eamon to develop a commercial version of the game entitled SwordThrust, but users continued creating and sharing adventures for the system.

In 1985, Jon Walker from Marshfield, Wisconsin converted Eamon to the PC and released several converted and new adventures. Eventually the disks were released through various shareware organizations and garnered a minor following. While the adventures attracted some modest interest, the direct conversion of the adventure creation program prompted much criticism among PC users for being too difficult to use and poorly written (the latter in later years by people who were probably never constrained by early versions of the BASIC language). By the time a serious attempt was made to upgrade the Eamon system to Foxbase, other adventures containing graphics and real time action were becoming popular and the project was scrapped.