Eamon 2K26
Donald Brown’s 1980 text adventure system, reborn for iPhone.
Eamon 2K26 is a faithful port of The Wonderful World of Eamon, the text adventure system Donald Brown released for the Apple ][ in 1980. Brown gave Eamon away — source code and all — and in the years that followed, a small army of volunteers wrote hundreds of adventures for it. For many of us, Eamon was the first RPG we ever played, and for some of us it was the first game we ever wrote.
This port keeps the original architecture intact: a persistent character who lives in the Main Hall between adventures, a weapon shop and a wizard, a bank to stash your gold, and a doorway that opens onto whatever adventure you choose to load next. The text is still the game. The imagination is still yours. iOS just happens to be the new floppy disk.
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The Main HallDonald Brown’s persistent hub. Create a character, visit the weapon shop, consult the wizard, stash your gold at the bank, and pick your next adventure.
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Beginner’s CaveThe adventure every Eamon player starts with. A short dungeon crawl designed to teach the system’s conventions — and to give a first-level adventurer a fighting chance at actually surviving.
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The Lair of the MinotaurDonald Brown’s second adventure and a step up in difficulty from the Cave. A classical labyrinth with a classical monster at the heart of it — the kind of dungeon that rewards map-making and punishes impatience.
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The Castle of DoomAnother Brown original, and exactly as foreboding as its name suggests. A full castle to explore, with all the chambers, corridors, and unwelcoming residents that implies. Best tackled once your adventurer has a few wins under their belt.
Eamon 2K26 is the player. Two companion projects live on GitHub for anyone who wants to build adventures, convert old ones, or just poke at the internals.
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An iPadOS authoring tool for the Eamon 2K26 runtime. Draw room maps on a canvas, populate them with monsters and artifacts, validate the whole adventure, and send it straight to the player app. A knowing tribute to Brown’s original Dungeon Designer Diskette for the Apple ][ — minus, as the README notes, the actual diskette.
DocHoward144/DungeonDesignerDiskette -
A utility for reading original Eamon disk images and converting their adventures into the JSON format Eamon 2K26 consumes. The bridge between forty years of volunteer-built Eamon adventures and the new runtime.
DocHoward144/EamonDiskConverter
Both projects are MIT-licensed. Pull requests welcome; bug reports equally welcome.
Eamon was the work of Donald Brown, written in Applesoft BASIC and released into the wild in 1980 with what would now be called an open-source ethos — Brown encouraged players to write their own adventures and share them freely. By the time the Apple ][ was winding down in the early nineties, something like 270 Eamon adventures had been written by volunteers, making it one of the earliest and largest user-contributed content libraries in gaming history. The National Eamon Users’ Club maintained a catalog. Adventures were traded on floppies, then BBSes, then the early web.
Eamon 2K26 is a love letter to that world. It aims to be the version Brown might have written if he’d had Swift and a Retina display instead of Applesoft and a green phosphor monitor.