*Okay, so there’s a lot to talk about with this, even we get to the gameplay. This is going to be a long post. So, you know, settle in, grab some snacks, skip it entirely, you know, whatever feels right.
*So, Eamon is . . . well, okay, so, it’s a text adventure game created by Donald Brown, a computer programmer who wanted to create a game for the Apple II that would also function as a kind of gaming network and game creation tool.
*I’m going to assume you know how text games work. If you don’t, check out the image above. It’s basically the computer telling you a story and you have the chance to interact with the characters in the stories, the environments, etc. I’m going to refer to each of these stories as an “adventure” as we go forward. We’ll get into the actual gameplay here in a bit, but just now when I start giving you numbers about how many adventures there are, each adventure is a self-contained narrative story where you interact with characters, enemies, objects, environments, etc. An interactive short story, if you will. Like The Oregon Trail itself would fit into Eamon as one adventure, if you know what I mean. This is just to give you a real idea of the scale of this game.
*So, Eamon was a completely non-commercial effort. Brown programmed the basic set-up for the game, a Main Hall area where the player can create a character, and then a basic tutorial adventure. He then released this into the Apple II community with a note that he encouraged distribution of the software and that he wanted other people to create their own adventures for Eamon using the software and distribute those to create a massive game world created by the players. He published technical information to help people understand how to create their own adventures.
*It’s honestly pretty visionary for 1980, right? And it seems to foreshadow so many things about the way users interact with games now. I mean, we’re essentially talking about the birth of video game expansions. DLC, you know? And crowd-sourcing, of course.
*And in what seems almost like a wish-fulfillment fantasy adventure of its own, Eamon takes off. By the end of 1980, there were twelve Eamon adventures, half of them written by Brown. By the end of 1985, there were 114 Eamon adventures being distributed freely on disk among the game’s community. At that point, Brown had written four more, bringing his total to ten. The other 104 adventures were the fulfillment of Brown’s dream, free-standing adventures that took place in the fantasy realm of Eamon, created by the players, all distributed for free. Hours and hours and hours of free content.
*Some of these were fairly simple adventures. Others were complex enough that they required two or even three disks to contain the entire game.
*I mean, disks weren’t what they are now, but you get the drift.
*Things would slow down, of course, as the years passed, but Eamon has been around now for over forty years and the last official count of adventures stands at 278. The most recent adventure is Escape from Mt. Moon, created by Logan Blizzard. It was released . . . six months ago.
*No, I’m dead serious. November of 2021. Donald Brown could have never even imagined. Forty-one years later, the adventures are still happening.
*If you’re interested, here’s the running list being maintained over at the, still very active, Eamon Wiki. It notes that the 279th adventure is currently being written.
*So, here’s where I really blow your mind and you’re going to find that list of adventures handy.
*It’s often a struggle to find a way to play the games on this list, mainly because I want to play them in something approximating the original experience I would have had if I’d been playing the game upon release. You know, I don’t want to play some new spiffy graphics-laden version of The Oregon Trail. I want to play that very first text game, as close as I can come to that 1971 version that was so purely text that it didn’t even have a monitor, just a printer.
*Of course, that isn’t always easy, or even possible at all, to do. I ended up playing the 1975 version of The Oregon Trail because that 1971 version has been totally lost. Likewise, I couldn’t find an arcade cabinet of Boot Hill, so I played a version on my computer that was, at best, only an approximation, lacking in both the graphical and mechanical innovations of the original.
*Finding the original Eamon isn’t exactly something that I could pull off. But a very close experience to that original Eamon is Eamon Deluxe from 1988. It has some graphics at the beginning and the Main Hall area is rendered graphically. But in Eamon Deluxe you can load those original Eamon adventures and those play exactly as they originally did, as text stories that you interact with.
*You can find Eamon Deluxe for free on the Internet Archive.
*Here’s what I recommend you do. Dive the **** in.
*It’s pretty self-explanatory to get you through those first few text screens. Once in the Main Hall, you can move around and buy weapons, armor, skills in magic, etc. All you have to do to access the adventures is go to the top of the main hall and leave. It’s going to bring up a prompt that will allow you to go on an Adventure. Selecting that option will open up a screen with many sets of adventures, grouped by author and such. You can go into the Donald Brown menu, for instance, and access all of the adventures he created. Those adventures play in Eamon Deluxe essentially the same way they would have played in the original Eamon.
*Forty-two years later, the dream of hours upon hours of COMPLETELY FREE adventures is still a reality.
*I recommend playing a couple, just for the fun and the history of it. It’s an interesting experience. Which we’ll now get into my experiences. The Beginners Adventures menu is a good place to start. Start, in fact, with The Beginner’s Cave. It’s literally exactly where you would have started sitting at your Apple II in 1980.
*Anyway, let’s get to the my walkthrough of the game. This is the first story-heavy game we’ve played on this journey. You may recall I did a special “leap ahead” edition of one of these post a while back on the first Silent Hill, so I’ll be doing this review the same way I did that one, which is to say giving a basic walkthrough of the entire story of the game.
*So, yes, I did decide to play through all 278 of the existing adventures.
*Haha, just kidding, that would be completely insane. Does kinda sound like something I’d do though, doesn’t it?
*So, how did I decide what to play here? Well, I went very specifically with the details on the list entry: Eamon by Donald Brown from 1980. So I decided to play through only the adventures available the year of the game’s launch, 1980, and only the adventures written by Brown himself.
*And, yes, even as early as 1980, basically immediately upon the game’s release, other people were writing adventures. Jim Jacobson wrote a whopping five adventures by the end of 1980 and Red Farnum and David Cook both wrote one adventure.
*So, what that works out to is six adventures by Donald Brown that were available to play in 1980. So, we’ll go through those in turn.
*The first, The Beginner’s Cave, is essentially a quasi-tutorial and a grinding location of sorts. You can return to this adventure whenever you want and play through it again in order to get loot fairly easily and quickly.
*Well, I suppose the first thing to note is the character creation. You create a character with a name and you get a set of stats related to combat, charisma, magic, etc. Those stats can be increased by experience and also by essentially buying experience by going to the Main Hall and buying “practice” rounds at a combat training booth and a magic booth. The Main Hall also features a place to buy and upgrade weapons, buy and upgrade magic spells, a bank to place your money and a casino where you can gamble. Probably a couple of other things too.
*The bank is pretty important. If your character dies in an adventure, he or she isn’t actually dead. You can immediately play again or go back to the Main Hall. But you do lose loot that you have with you when you die. So, always deposit your money in the bank between adventures; that way the only loot you lose should you die is the loot you picked up in that adventure.
*Anyway, the notion of actually having a character with stats that you can upgrade and an inventory of items you can upgrade . . . these are huge steps forwards for gaming obviously.
*I feel like I should say at this point that it’s starting to get kind of muddy in terms of who should get credit for being the “first” at some new gaming innovation. This list I’m using is arranged chronologically by year, but within each year, the games are arranged alphabetically, not by when they were released in the year.
*So, in 1980, you really have four games come out that kind of start to really define the RPG. You’ve got Eamon, MUD, Rogue & Zork. They all kind of have different focuses (foci?) and some of them are clearly more in one direction than the other in terms of the different RPG elements. But they’re all kind of influencing each other to some degree.
*Because, for one thing, a lot of these games had been percolating off the market for a while. Zork, for instance, was out there as early as 1978 in a playable, but fragmentary form. Likewise, the first two adventures of Eamon were being played by industry people in 1979. And MUD, well, MUD had been accessible on the closed intranet of Essex University since 1978 as well; 1980 is when the game went live on the ARPANET, the internet of the time.
*So, I think in calendar terms of 1980, Eamon went live earlier in 1980 than Zork I did; but Donald Brown had played the original version of Zork in 1978 and openly talked it about as an influence on Eamon.
*So, anyway, as we move into the time period when you’re getting a lot of games, and a lot of them very innovative, dropping in the space of a single calendar year, it’s getting harder and harder to draw clean lines in the way that you could draw a line between, for instance, Space Invaders in 1978 and Galaxian in 1979. The industry itself is just growing or it might be even more accurate to say that the art form of video games is growing and as the 80s begin, we’re looking at more and more of a stew of games, all taking influences from each other and engaging in parallel thinking and such.
*So, anyway, all this is just to say that I don’t know that I can say for sure that Eamon is the first game to use some of these proto-RPG elements, like character stats and leveling up objects. Because, of course, MUD existed in more than one version before 1980 as well, so I don’t know in what versions those things started showing up there. Anyway, you get what I’m saying.
*Anyway, at least in terms of our journey here, Eamon is the first time we’re encountering a lot of the things that are going to become foundational elements of the RPG genre.
*Okay, so The Beginner’s Cave. The in-game premise is that the local warlord has the cave stocked with easily defeatable foes and various treasures in order for the local knights and warriors to gain experience in combat.
*Here, by the way, is a map of The Beginner’s Cave. Every adventure now has a map like this; originally, of course, they didn’t. You just navigate by the text telling you, for instance, “You’re in a tunnel running from north to south; on each side of the tunnel is a door leading to a room (N/S/E/W).” And then you pick a direction. Players of the game have now created these maps for basically all of the adventures, I think.
*In the cave, you will meet various characters. An old hermit with a vial of healing potion that you can take. A dude named Heinrich that you can smile at and he will either attack you, ignore or come with you to explore the rest of the cave, depending, I guess, on your charisma. I don’t know. I got different reactions from him every time I played the cave.
*You also encounter a classic monster in one of the rooms, a Mimic. It appears to be a treasure chest when you enter the room, but when you attempt to open it, it reveals its true form and attacks you.
*Later, you’ll run into a pirate with some jewels and a magical sword named Trollsfire which you get to take and use on your other adventures.
*Anyway, the cave just kind of introduces the mechanics of moving around the world and some pretty easy combat with rats and, you know, the pirate and the Mimic.
*The commands you can use are your basic text game commands: GO, USE, READ, LOOK, TALK, FIGHT, HEAL, etc. There’s a lot of them. You know, like SMILE. That’s not one it seems like is standard for every text game.
*If you’ve ever played a text game, you know, they all play more or less the same.
*Second adventure is The Lair of the Minotaur.
*Just for reference, here’s the map for this one.
*As you can see, things get very complex in some of these. And, remember, this is only the second adventure of Eamon ever, so, man, I wonder how crazy some of the later ones are.
*Like the original Eamon disk that Donald Brown and his friends distributed contained the Main Hall, The Beginner’s Cave and The Lair of the Minotaur. Later adventures would require two or even three disks for one adventure.
*Anyway, as The Lair of the Minotaur begins, the player is on the way to meet his or her significant other, Larcenous Lil or Slippery Sven, depending on the gender of your character. So, it was Lil for me, so that’s what I’ll use to refer to that character.
*It seems Lil has been captured by a guy who lives in a local castle. Upon trying to enter the castle yourself, you find yourself dropping through a trap door and with no way to get back up, you have to go deeper into the tunnels under the castle.
*Anyway, this one features a section where you ride a boat down a river and you can drown if you don’t get off in time. There are also a ton of enemies in this one: a skeleton, a black knight, a bunny, the high priest of a Minotaur worshiping cult, a blacksmith and, eventually, the Minotaur himself. Survive all that and you’ll come out with a lot of loot: a magical bag that allows you to carry very heavy things, a golden anvil (see above bag for how exactly you carry an anvil made of gold), the Minotaur’s battle-ax and, of course, Larcenous Lil, safe and sound.
*You will also meet a “wandering minstrel eye,” which is a giant floating eye-ball that sings songs. I was pretty flabbergasted by this, honestly.
*Anyway, this is a good time to talk about the fact that this game’s tone is ultimately just really silly, very comedic and very heavily referential. Like the bunny you fight in this adventure is obviously the bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And, though I didn’t get this at the time, the “wandering minstrel eye,” is a joke based on the Gilbert & Sullivan song “A Wandering Minstrel I.”
*I’ll talk a bit more about this in a later adventure as well, but the jokey tone and the pop-culture references make this game feel, in some ways, like kind of modern. Also, I have to say . . . kind of cringe. More on that later.
*Combat is definitely harder in this adventure than the first one. The enemies are stronger and none of them are really one-hit kills, the way just about everybody was in The Beginner’s Cave.
*The combat is turn based. You type in “attack rat” or whatever and then the game tells you if you did a glancing blow or a direct hit or just missed entirely and then the rat attacks you and the game tells you if it hit or didn’t.
*One thing I really like that this game does is that after every “hit” in combat, it tells you the overall state of the character that just got hit. So, it might say something like, “A direct hit! The rat is really hurting” or “the rat is nearly dead” or something like that. The characters here don’t have a health bar you can see, so this is kind of the text based version of a health bar. I liked it.
*The third & fourth adventures for Eamon were created by Jim Jacobson and Red Farnum: The Cave of the Mind & The Zyphur Riverventure.
*As portmanteaus go . . . it’s not a good one.
*Anyway, we’ll skip those and move on to the fifth adventure, Donald Brown’s third, Castle of Doom.
*Castle of Doom is kind of back to the Beginner’s Cave mode as far as not having really any story at all. The premise is that these two kindly old ladies have a Castle of Doom where they keep a bunch of monsters and treasure just so warriors can come and have fun exploring.
*Anyway, as one explores the Castle of Doom, one encounters a lot of different enemies, a Mimic, like from the first adventure, a Succubus, a Mummy, a “carrion crawler,” a tiger, two harpies, a Vampire, a Sphinx . . .
*The fact that you don’t need character models in a text game really frees a creator up in terms of enemy variety.
*If you’re keeping up with annoying pop culture references, I should mention that at the beginning of the story, you encounter three dwarves named Huey, Dewey & Louie. You’ll also encounter a guy wielding a sword named “Sting.”
*That one’s a reference to The Hobbit, not the musical artist.
*They will accompany you on your adventure and they’re a big help in combat, of course. They all get a turn in every round of combat.
*In one room, you find an emerald in a stand. It’s labeled “Brown Travel Agency.” When you touch it, it transports you into an underground dungeon with more enemies and treasure. If you think an emerald labeled Brown Travel Agency is stupid, just wait.
*The way you get back to the castle from the underground dungeon is by finding an Oscar for Special Effects and touching it.
*How does one even come up with something that stupid?
*So, there’s something kind of weird going on with this game.
*It is, so far, the game most interested in actual world-building. You know, it has actual lore and it’s built to continually be expanded. It is the game that we’ve encountered thus far that is the most interested in creating a fully-realized world and immersing the player in it.
*It is also constantly breaking the fourth wall and winking at the player with immersion-breaking pop culture jokes.
*I find the push and pull of these two impulses kind of fascinating. It wants to both create a richly detailed and immersive world and also pull you out of it at every turn. It’ll give you a detailed description of an environment with hidden riches and details to explore and discover and then send Donald Duck’s nephews along with you. It’s constantly taking its worldbuilding very seriously and then undercutting it completely.
*I said it was kind of fascinating and it kind of is, if you’re doing like a critical analysis of the game. In terms of actually playing the game, I didn’t like it at all.
*This neatly segues us right into Brown’s fourth adventure, The Death Star.
*Allow me to just quote directly from the opening of this adventure: “As you left the Main Hall, you suddenly felt a queer wrench in your stomach, as if you had been turned inside-out, then right again. When things became clear again, you found yourself at the helm of a spaceship! You realize you have gone through a reality shift!”
*To be specific, you are at the helm of the Millennium Falcon, currently trapped on the Death Star. Armed with only “your father’s light sabre,” you must find a way to turn off the tractor beam and escape.
*That’s right, it is, in 1980, before Empire Strikes Back has even come out, the very first video game adaptation of Star Wars.
*Legal only because this game was never sold, I suppose.
*You can go for the tractor beam objective only and escape just fine to end the adventure. You can also choose to try to rescue Princess Leia, Artoo, Threepio & Chewbacca, though the latter is never called by name and only described as “A Wookiee.”
*Not sure why they pulled that punch. I don’t think you, the player, are ever referred to as Luke Skywalker either.
*The enemies are stormtroopers who are extremely easy kills.
*I’ll tell you who isn’t an easy kill though: Darth Vader himself! Armed with a “dark sabre,” (somewhere a youthful Kevin J. Anderson gets a really bad idea!), he’s pretty well just going to kill you instantly if you run into him.
*I think he’s genuinely randomized. Like I don’t know exactly how text games like this work, but he isn’t just always in the same place or anything.
*Once you’ve rescued the prisoners, they will help in combat, which leads to the game saying things like, “Threepio claws at a stormtrooper!”
*Oh, this adventure also features sound effects for the blaster shots and the light saber and the ship taking off. They’re just random computer bleeps, not the actual sound effects from the movie, of course.
*I will say that I wasn’t aware that my speakers were cranked pretty high while I was playing this game, because, you know, text game. So it just about gave me a heart attack when the first sound effect hit.
*There’s a kind of cool thing where you can actually use a TIE Fighter to escape without having to turn off the tractor beam . . . but then the game tells you that you died because you were killed by the Rebels who were attacking the Death Star.
*If you disable the tractor beam, you can get away in the Falcon, with or without Leia, the droids and Chewbacca; the adventure ends as you go through another “reality shift” and are relieved to get back to a world with “simple things like dragons and ogres.”
*Anyway, there it is. Star Wars has entered the world of video games. Predictably, it’s awful.
*The next two adventures for Eamon were by Jim Jacobson, The Devil’s Tomb & The Abductor’s Quarters. SKIP.
*Donald Brown’s fifth adventure is Assault on the Clone Master. In this one, you find yourself drafted into service by some rebels who are attempting to overthrow the Clone Master and destroy his Clonatorium. As you sneak into the Clone Master’s fortress, you are accompanied by three of the rebels, Natty of Nickleton, Nevil the Gnasher and Norwood the Nervous.
*Jesus Christ, this is stupid.
*Anyway, you kill enemies, get weapons, get loot, etc.
*Worth mentioning is that if you find the Clone Master’s bedroom you will be able to steal his Apple II computer.
*So, I know that in 2022, we’re all kind of pissed off about this whole thing with games that are going to start adding in-game ads. Let’s just hope as we move into this brave new world of marketing that the advertisements are somewhat more subtle than this one.
*Anyway, I guess you’re in some kind of space-time rift in this one too because when you kill the Clone Master you’ll be able to take his “gun,” which is a strange object that you don’t entirely understand. The rebels then show you where the temporal rift is that will allow you to get back to your own Eamon universe.
*I suppose this might make the Apple II appearing in this adventure make a little more sense except this presumably takes place far in the future since humanity has perfected cloning. Would the guy who perfected cloning still be using an Apple II?
*The next adventure is provided by David Cook; it’s called The Magic Kingdom, but it’s not about Disney World.
*Hang on, actually, let me check, who ******* knows, it might actually be about Disney World.
*Okay, no, The Magic Kingdom actually takes place in Magic Kingdom State Park which is *checks notes* yes, actually stupider than if it had been in Disney World.
*All right, let’s get to Donald Brown’s sixth & final adventure of 1980, The Tomb of Molinar. After this one, we’ll be mercifully moving on from this game.
*So, as The Tomb of Molinar begins, you are given a special mission by the King. Long ago, there lived a wise leader named Molinar; when he grew weary of his long life, he prepared a special tomb for himself where he could sleep until such time as he might be needed again. Now, some vaguely defined enemy has conjured an even more vaguely defined evil and the only way for Eamon to survive is for Molinar to be roused from his deathly slumber.
*There’s a magic mirror that has trapped a previous wanderer in it; you can free him by destroying the mirror. If you try to take the mirror, you will be pulled into it and trapped yourself. There’s a large underground area that you can find with a hidden lever. You’ll find an elderly woman named Lycernia chained up there; if you free her, she will instantly become young and beautiful and come with you on the rest of your adventure.
*I’m going to come back to something about this lower area in my wrap up because it’s key to why I disliked this game so much.
*It’s a thing with a dragon. Remind me about it.
*It’s . . . literally impossible for you to do that.
*You will encounter a chained up wizard named Monimar that you can free, if you’re a ******* idiot and have forgotten the name of the adventure you’re playing.
*Anyway, pressing on through the tomb, you encounter a giant made of stone. I couldn’t get past this guy.
*None of my weapons were powerful enough to do much damage at all, not even the “gun” that I got from the Clone Master. When I would hit him, it would tell me that he was barely scratched. And then like two hits from the guardian and I was dead. Your friend from the mirror and Lycernia are basically meat shield at this point, but even with the guardian fighting them first, I really couldn’t deal any damage at all.
*So, after a couple of runs where I tried a couple of different weapons on the guy, I gave up and so The Tomb of Molinar remains uncompleted by me.
*The stone guardian is the last enemy in the adventure. If you kill him, apparently you find Molinar in the room right behind him and you wake him up. If you freed Monimar earlier, Molinar will instantly kill him and tell you that he was one of the most evil wizards who has ever lived. He also says that he won’t tell anyone you stupidly released him.
*Stand up guy, Molinar.
*Apparently, if you free Monimar and leave with him instead of progressing further and finding Molinar, the game would tell you that the world of Eamon ended and then it would erase the adventure entirely from the disk. That’s pretty cool.
*Anyway, that’s it for the six adventures Donald Brown released for Eamon in 1980, so that’ll be that.
*I didn’t enjoy this game very much.
*It’s not that I dislike the text adventure style of game. I played a game just last year that had a lengthy section that was a retro take on the text adventure, Stories Untold. And I loved that game, particularly that section, which was able to create a real sense of suspense and terror. I find the reading/typing mechanic of text games to be enjoyable and often fun.
*So, I think my main problem here is honestly just that I didn’t find Brown’s voice at all appealing. Maybe, end of the day, it would have been instructive to play a couple of adventures written by somebody else to see if they were much different. From what I see online it seems that the Eamon style adventure often has the kind of meta-comedy that Brown’s adventures did. It makes sense that people would follow the template Brown laid down; obviously, if you fell in love with the game to the degree that you wanted to write an adventure for it, you would have had to fall in love with it by initially playing the Donald Brown adventures that I talked about in this post, so the majority of the Eamon adventures were almost certainly written by people who had the same sense of humor as Brown.
*I talked above about how I found the game’s dueling impulses (detailed and intricate world-building vs. immersion-breaking meta-comedy) really quite puzzling. It’s just strange to me that those are the two things in Eamon that we haven’t really seen before on this journey. To talk about what makes Eamon special, the “innovations” as it were, you have to talk about two things that don’t go together. At least in my opinion, they don’t.
*Let’s go back to the dragon in The Tomb of Molinar. He’s sitting on a massive pile of treasure (hmm, that’s probably a reference to something as well . . . but what? WHAT?), but when I attacked him, I did almost no damage and then he killed me with one hit. So, clearly, there’s something else to be done with the dragon.
*Before I encountered the dragon, I had found a net in another room in the underground section. On the net was written “DUM-DE-DUM-DUM.” I just, you know, took the net and didn’t even bother thinking about why it said that.
*The thought entered my head, “I wonder if I can use the net on the dragon.” And that’s when the penny dropped.
*Once upon a time, kids, there was a radio program that then became a television program that was one of the most iconic police procedurals of its time, a little show featuring Detective Joe Friday, called Dragnet. Jack Webb’s dry, affectless line deliveries became iconic, iconic enough that the show was ultimately spoofed in a movie from the 80s with Dan Ackroyd mimicking Webb’s bone-dry tones.
*One of the most iconic things about that show was its instantly memorable theme song.
*I mean, who remembers it now? That’s why I put the video there.
*You might notice a certain recurring motif in that theme song, a motif of four big brassy notes. A motif that might be rendered in text as “dum-de-dum-dum.”
*That’s right, those words are written on the net because this is a “dragon net.”
*YOU KNOW LIKE “DRAGNET.”
* . . .
* . . .
*Okay, well, hopefully that was enough a pause to allow you to compose yourself from that gut-buster. Oh my sides.
*Look, no offense, but that is the stupidest ******* thing I’ve ever heard.
*I literally face-palmed. I let out a heavy sigh and just put my face in my hands.
*Also, I’m just going to say that I feel like that joke was extremely creaky even in 1980. Dragnet started on TV in 1951. As they go, that one ain’t exactly on Pop Culture Reference’s cap the very button.
*Says the guy who just made a Hamlet joke.
*Anyway, I don’t know that joke just seemed to encapsulate everything annoying about the humor of Eamon. Labored, tired, incredibly stupid. Coming, as it did, in the final of the six adventures I was playing, it really seemed like . . . well, I just knew I was really glad I was going to get to leave the wonderful world of Eamon behind as soon as I finished that story.
*But, seriously, let’s talk about comedy.
*Comedy in video games, I mean. Are video games in some fundamental way just not suited to comedy? I think it’s a question worth asking. I mean, some genres are just better suited for the format than others. Horror, for instance, is particularly well-suited for video games, I think. Comedy, on the other hand . . .
*I mean, here’s a very simple and serious challenge: name a great comedy video-game. For real, can anybody come up with one? I can’t. I mean, the only things that come to mind are like Leisure Suit Larry which hardly seem like masterpieces to me, though, find, to be fair, I haven’t played them, so maybe they’re great. I doubt it.
*And get outta here with your Jill sandwiches and your Spider-Man 3 clips. I mean intentionally funny. God knows there are a lot of unintentionally funny video games.
*So, then what’s a funny video game? Like not primarily a comedy, but a video game with a lot of humor? I mean, of necessity, there has to be a funniest video game I’ve ever played, right?
*Damned if I know what it’d be. Celeste had a couple of really big laughs (“I drink, mostly.”) Until Dawn and The Wolf Among Us both had witty characters given to saying witty things.
*Anyway, comedy in gaming; interesting topic. Someone’s probably written an essay out there somewhere. Perchance.
*And, look, there’s a lot of people out there who could hardly play Eamon for guffawing, I guess. Comedy is subjective.
*Anyway, look, I did have some fun with Eamon. And it’s a game that, due to its ready availability, I do recommend everyone spend at least a bit of time with.
*I mean, it’s literally a mouse-click away and you can play it right there in your browser. For historical reasons alone, I think it’s worth playing The Beginner’s Cave. And I’d recommend Castle of Doom. I think Castle of Doom is better than Lair of the Minotaur and it’s just full of all kinds of villains and interesting loot. It’s a fun map.
*But it just kind wore out its novelty after about three adventures and the constant silliness just wasn’t funny to me and was honestly just cringey most of the time. Like I was cringing a lot playing this game and not for the reasons some of these early games are cringey. Like bad graphics or bad controls . . . I mean, that’s just the limitations of technology, so you might cringe, but you forgive it. But this is a game entirely defined by its writing. And I just didn’t enjoy the voice of the main writer.
*If you’re reading this and you loved Eamon, please talk about it. Obviously, a lot of people loved the game back in the day. Heck, if you WROTE AN EAMON ADVENTURE please talk about that.
*I mean, the chances aren’t exactly good that anyone reading this wrote an adventure for Eamon, but the chances are probably better than if you were just in a crowd of random people in the real world, so I thought I’d ask.
*Anyway, Eamon. I’m glad I played it, though ultimately, I can’t really recommend it as anything other than historical experience. It was cool to experience and it was fun enough for about three adventures; then it kind of stopped being fun.
*Anyway, it is what it is. Mark Eamon off the list with a mixed, leaning negative review.
*Okay, so, next time we’re gonna get a little simpler again by hitting up the arcade for yet another Atari game: Missile Command!