Eye of the Beholder (video game)

Lore & Background

The game's plot follows a team of adventurers hired by the lords of Waterdeep to investigate an evil beneath the city. They enter the sewers, but the entrance collapses due to Xanathar, the beholder. The party descends through Dwarf and Drow clans to Xanathar's lair for the final confrontation. The original MS-DOS version had a minimal ending with a small blue window; the Amiga version added an animated ending.

Gameplay is first-person with pseudo-3D graphics, similar to Dungeon Master. Players control four characters initially, using a point-and-click interface, and can increase the party to six by resurrecting skeletons or recruiting NPCs. The ability to recruit NPCs was present in the first two games, but Eye of the Beholder III does not allow NPC recruitment in the same manner. Parties could be imported between the first two sequels, but Eye of the Beholder III does not support importing parties from the previous games.

Development used Deluxe Paint for MS-DOS graphics and included over 150 Adlib sound effects. The Sega CD version featured a soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima. A port to the Atari Lynx by NuFX in 1993 was not released. A Game Boy Advance adaptation by Pronto Games appeared in 2002.

Reader's Guide

Eye of the Beholder is significant as one of the early successful Dungeons & Dragons computer games, bringing the first-person dungeon crawl to IBM PC owners with VGA graphics and sound card audio. It received critical acclaim, including a 5/5 rating from Dragon magazine and a 92% from The One for the Amiga version. Despite criticisms of its abrupt ending and spell interface, it was praised for its atmosphere and puzzle-solving emphasis. Commercially, SSI sold 129,234 copies, with over 150,000 worldwide by mid-1991.

The series overall sold over 350,000 units by 1996. Its legacy includes two sequels, a trilogy CD-ROM release, and fan remakes for Neverwinter Nights and Commodore 64. IGN and Paste both ranked it among the top Dungeons & Dragons games of all time.