Eon of Tears: Where Are They Now?
Note: The original interview with Evillusion’s Scriptwriting Director Dominic Arsenault, conducted by Robbie “Fleshmaker” Coker while Eon of Tears was still in development, is preserved on the Internet Archive. The quotes below come from it.
Eon of Tears was one of the strangest RPG pitches of the early 2000s: a fantasy RPG that lets you play through the biggest events in the Bible, and rewrite them. Evillusion, a small studio from Montréal, showed it at E3 2003 and promised a dark, mature game with crafting, a moral system and survival horror sections. It was never released. Here is what the game was meant to be, what Arsenault said about it, and where the people behind it ended up.
What Eon of Tears Was
Evillusion was founded in Montréal in 2000, with a team of more than 25 people working remotely from North America, France, Belgium and Sweden. Eon of Tears: The Bible Code was its first game. The studio announced it in August 2002, with a playable demo planned for that autumn and a full release for spring 2004.
The idea was simple to say and very hard to build. In Arsenault’s words, “the player will get a shot at the biggest events in the Bible: unleashing the ten plagues of Egypt, seeing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, leading the conquest of Canaan, or performing some of the miracles as Jesus-Christ.” The game would take different theories about those events, ask “What if…”, and wrap the answers in fantasy.
Arsenault was clear that this was not a religious product. “Keep in mind it isn’t an edutainment title or a game under the pro-catholic banner,” he said. The Bible was chosen because it is full of dramatic moments that most people only half know, and because it “will not yield just another medieval RPG.”
Seven Eras, From Moab to Hell
The story jumps between seven main locations, each in a different time:
| Location | When | What you would see |
|---|---|---|
| The land of Moab, around the Dead Sea | 1900 BC | Deserts, nomad camps and ruins, thirty years after Sodom and Gomorrah |
| Egypt | Around 1460 BC | The time of Moses, the Red Sea crossing and Mount Sinai |
| Canaan | 1420 BC | Joshua’s conquest, fertile valleys and the city of Jericho |
| Galilee | The time of Jesus | The life and miracles of Jesus |
| Jerusalem | 1099 AD | The city taken by the Crusaders |
| Earth after the Apocalypse | After the Apocalypse | The Middle East in “ruins, fire and blood” |
| Hell | Not given | “Loosely based on Dante’s vision” |
What Dominic Arsenault Said About the Game
The interview is long and detailed, and it shows a team that had thought hard about its systems. These are the ideas that stand out today.
A Bible That Writes Itself
There were no “good or evil” branching points. Instead, every decision nudged your Inclination, which Arsenault described as your “relationship with the Divine, the Profane, and himself.” By the end, your choices would put you on one of three paths: follow the law of God, help Satan destroy Him, or look after yourself. Each path had its own goal and ending.
Your in-game journal was the Bible itself, writing itself as you played. “If you do exactly what Moses did, you’ll end up with the very same Bible we know today,” Arsenault said. An evil player would not get to play Jesus, but Judas, and would play a Pharaoh’s troop commander instead of Moses. Sometimes only the mindset changed: an evil Joshua would not be “liberating the land of Canaan from the evil-doers”, but would “exterminate the sinners to the bitter end”.
Characters Who Live Through the Ages
Jumping across 3,000 years created a problem for an RPG: how do you keep the same party? Arsenault said time travel “was definitely not possible”, but new companions in every chapter would ruin long-term character growth. The answer was six archetypes whose stats carry over from one character to the next. Lot, who joins you in the ruins of Sodom, is the first incarnation of the “Enchanter”. In the Moses chapter, Aaron takes over as the second Enchanter, with the same stats, skills and experience that Lot had.
You would travel with two companions at a time and could swap partners often. Some events would only trigger with the right characters in your party.
Combat, Crafting and Skill Trees
Combat used a classic menu (Attack, Magic, Items) on a battlefield where characters could move and use the terrain. The twist was “init points”: you could spend them on one hard hit or a string of quick blows, or anything in between. Fights happened exactly where you met the enemy, so if you failed to sneak past a monster in a cave, you fought it in that same cave, not on a generic battle screen.
Crafting worked for both spells and weapons. Arsenault’s example: kill a Gulvin, take its scales, and ask a weaponsmith to forge a bronze short sword with three Gulvin scales and an angel feather. The bronze gives a heavy blade with good damage, the feather slows enemies, and the scales poison them.
Characters grew through skill trees, and you chose where each character’s experience went. Moab, for example, could put 66% of his experience into Fencing and 34% into Sunder. Alignment mattered here too: an evil character could only use Life magic to kill, while a good one could only use it to heal.
Music, Monsters and Online Plans
Mattias Holmgren composed the music, with a semi-random system where each track had “turning points” that could loop back or jump to another track written to fit. Most enemies were supernatural, with the story explaining where they came from. There was no multiplayer, but Evillusion planned an online marketplace where players could sell the weapons they made, so you could see items your own path would never give you.
The team was ambitious about the audience too. Arsenault expected hardcore RPG fans to enjoy the skill and weapon systems, and hoped the theme would get “your uncle or sister” to at least look at the box. He also promised survival horror sections for action fans.
A Warning About Indie Development
At the time of the interview, the general design was finished, monsters and characters were modelled, Gomorrah was built and a combat prototype was nearly done. Arsenault ended with a warning that turned out to be accurate: “the current state of the gaming industry makes it extremely difficult for new independent developers to succeed in making their first game.”
What Happened to Eon of Tears?
For a while, things looked good. Evillusion exhibited at E3 2003 and said the game “stirred quite some interest from many different parties”. A two-minute teaser cut from its trailer went online, and IGN ran an interview with the team. Unseen64, which tracks cancelled games, lists Eon of Tears as a cancelled Xbox project.
Then the news stopped. The last update on Evillusion’s website is from April 2004, and the site never changed again. The game never shipped, no publisher was announced, and Evillusion never released anything else.
No official reason was ever given. Looking back, the obstacles are easy to see: a first game from a remote team, a scope that covered seven eras and survival horror on top of a full RPG, and a theme many publishers would have found risky. Arsenault’s own closing words in the interview describe the problem better than any guess.
Where Are They Now?
Dominic Arsenault
Arsenault moved from making games to studying them. He completed a master’s in film studies at the Université de Montréal in 2006 and is now an Associate Professor of Film and Game Studies there. He teaches narratology, video game screenwriting and the history and theory of animated film.
His book Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware is a history of the Super Nintendo, published by MIT Press in its Platform Studies series. He is also one of the editors of Fifty Key Video Games (Routledge). Outside the university, he records chipmetal, video game style music mixed with heavy metal, as Multi-Memory Controller.
Evillusion
Evillusion’s website stayed online for years after the last update, frozen on its April 2004 news. The studio never released a game. What remains are the archived interviews, the screenshots and the trailer clips, which still give a good idea of how unusual the project was.
Eon of Tears’ Legacy
Eon of Tears never got the chance to prove itself, so its legacy is its ideas. Some still feel ahead of their time: a journal that rewrites a famous text based on your choices, a morality system with no single “turn evil” moment, and archetypes that let a party grow across thousands of years.
It is also a good example of how hard it was for a small studio to make a big RPG without a publisher in the early 2000s. Today a team like Evillusion might crowdfund a demo or launch in early access. In 2003, a strong E3 showing was not enough.
Did you follow Eon of Tears back then, or did you work on it? Share your memories in the comments, or through our contact page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Eon of Tears ever released?
No. Evillusion showed the game at E3 2003, but news stopped in April 2004 and the game was never released.
Who made Eon of Tears?
Evillusion, a studio founded in Montréal in 2000, with team members working remotely across North America and Europe. Dominic Arsenault was its Scriptwriting Director.
Was Eon of Tears a Christian game?
No. Dominic Arsenault said it was not an edutainment title or a pro-Catholic game. It used Bible events as a fantasy setting and let players follow God, help Satan or look after themselves.
What platform was Eon of Tears for?
Unseen64 lists Eon of Tears as a cancelled Xbox game. Evillusion never announced a publisher or a release date.
What is Dominic Arsenault doing now?
He is an Associate Professor of Film and Game Studies at the Université de Montréal and wrote a book on the history of the Super Nintendo for MIT Press.
Related Guides
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- Todd Howard in the Morrowind Era: the original interview from Bethesda’s early days.
- Complete Manarion Guide: a modern browser RPG, explained from the start.
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Last updated: October 2026.
