DOS

Eye of the Beholder

Trivia

This game was being ported to Atari's Lynx by NuFX, Inc., but development was halted. Prototypes have since been leaked to the internet.

Eye of the Beholder is one of many games that shares it's name with a song by the heavy metal band "Metallica" (which appears to be quite popular with programmers). Others include "Seek & Destroy", "Fade To Black", "Disposable Heroes" and "Sanitarium".

The final big boss, Xanathar is actually The Beholder, as he (is it he? or was it she? :-) says to you (when you get to the endgame for final confrontation) that all those traps you encountered, and minions you fought was just a play to watch, and that he was watching you all the way (that only gets him beholder title). Now, as you can notice, he looks like a big bowling eye, with many pipes that ends also with an eye (that gives him eye title). So, Eye of the Beholder would actually be himself.

As in this game he's the main bad guy, in "Eye of the Beholder II", there are actually many creatures that are from his race, and are no such threat.

Contributed by MAT (35305) on Jul 26, 2000.

Eye of the Beholder was praised for its stylish cinematic opening sequence, which dazzled players and set the stage of the game to follow.

However, since the final game's size weighed in at 5 3.5" disks, SSI decided to cut the ending cinematic, figuring very few players would see it anyway, and it was not worth the extra cost of the sixth disk.

When EotB became a smash hit, MANY players who slogged it out to the end of the game were not amused when they were "rewarded" with a simple text message and unceremoniously dropped to DOS.

SSI soon realized their mistake, but the damage could not be undone. Many players assumed the game simply never had an ending, never suspecting it existed but was not included!

The Amiga version was later released with the final endgame graphic.