Something evil is lurking below the city of Waterdeep. The Lords of Waterdeep summon a group of heroes to investigate, but someone or something has been watching the proceedings. After the heroes enter the sewers, the ceiling collapses behind them. The only way out is the way down, into a dungeon filled with monsters, traps and puzzles.

Eye of the Beholder is a dungeon crawler RPG with a first-person perspective based on the 2nd Edition AD&D rules. The starting party consists of four characters and up to two NPCs can join later. Combat and magic happen in real time, similarly to Dungeon Master. There is a variety of monsters to fight and spells to cast. The game features a point-and-click interface for fighting, spellcasting and handling objects.

[edit description | view history]

Screenshots

Eye of the Beholder DOS Inventory screen

Eye of the Beholder DOS Character Generation

Eye of the Beholder DOS Against creepy creatures (in-game shot -1)

[122 more | add screenshots]

Promo Images

Eye of the Beholder Magazine Advertisement Back cover

Eye of the Beholder Magazine Advertisement

[add promo images]

Alternate Titles

"EOB" -- Abbreviated title
"アイ・オブ・ザ・ビホルダー" -- Japanese spelling

[add alternate title]

Part of the Following Groups

User Reviews

One of the first good dungeon crawling RPGs of the early DOS times	Optimus (83)
A decent AD&D dungeon crawl	pogalogen (14)
Awesome for the time, still a great game today.	Gothicgene (83)
Dungeon Hacking at it's best...	Chris Martin (1204)
Wow!!!	lomikin (4)
A champion RPG for it's time.	Andrew Morgan (2)	unrated
A great game, but I liked its sequel much better.	Tomer Gabel (4634)
Any game with Larry Elmore's art on its cover is a good game.	OlSkool_Gamer (102)

[review game]

Critic Reviews

Dragon	Jul, 1991		100
Raze	Jun, 1991	92 out of 100	92
Tilt	May, 1991	18 out of 20	90
Joker Verlag präsentiert: Sonderheft	1992	87 out of 100	87
ASM (Aktueller Software Markt)	Apr, 1991	10 out of 12	83
Retro Archives	Jun 09, 2018	16.5 out of 20	82
ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)	May, 1991	780 out of 1000	78
Quandary	Jan, 1996		70
Computer Gaming World (CGW)	Jun, 1991	Unscored	Unscored
Computer Gaming World (CGW)	Jun, 1991	Unscored	Unscored

[see more rankings | add review]

Forums

Topic	# Posts	Last Post
correcting a review	2	Cavalary (11224) Jan 17, 2017

[new thread]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The PC version of Eye of the Beholder appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Boss

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.

Cancelled Lynx port

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

Character portraits

A number of the portraits in Eye of the Beholder were Westwood employees. These include Paul Mudra (Music and Design), Phil Gorrow (Lead Programmer and Design), Joseph Hewitt (Lead Artist and Design), Mike Legg (Programmer and Design), Frank Saxxon (Artist), Aaron Powell (Artist) and Eydie Laramore (Lead Writer and Design).

Ending

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.

However, many players who did slog it out to the end of the game and 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.

Also, there was one bit of the ending that most players never saw. Players were able to do what the developer's called the "EoB Two-Step," side-stepping, turning and side-stepping again, they were able to fight many monsters including the boss with risk of taking much damage. It was possible, though time consuming, to use this technique to kill Xanathar. This is not the way the game's designers had in mind for his defeat though. The player were supposed to lure and push Xanathar into one of the spike traps where there was a small animated sequence (basically 4 frames) of him being impaled and dying.

Title

Eye of the Beholder is one of many games that shares its name with a song by the heavy metal band Metallica.

Awards

Computer Gaming World
- November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #2 Least Rewarding Ending of All Time
Enchanted Realms
- September 1991 (Issue #8) – Distinctive Adventure Award

Information also contributed by Игги Друге, Martin Smith, and MAT

[edit trivia]

Related Web Sites

Eye of the Beholder - FAQs & Guides (A collection of walkthroughs for EOB1 on GameFaqs.com)
Eye of the Beholder Help Web (maps, walkthrough, cheats, char editors, etc.)
Eye of the Beholder I (Fan site by Stanislav Sokolov with maps, walkthrough, monster descriptions, etc.)
The All-Seeing Eye (An automapper for the DOS versions of the first two Eye of the Beholder)

Chris Martin (1204) added Eye of the Beholder (DOS) on Feb 07, 2000

Other platforms contributed by saikofish (961), Stillman (7619), Terok Nor (32096) and MAT (229787)