Eye of the Beholder

A port to the Atari Lynx handheld was developed by NuFX in 1993, but was not released. In 2002, an adaptation of the same name was developed by Pronto Games for the Game Boy Advance. The game has two sequels: the first was Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, which was also released in 1991; after Westwood Studios was acquired by Virgin Interactive in 1992, Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor was released in 1993. The third game, however, was not developed by Westwood, who instead went on to create the Lands of Lore series.

• Title — Eye of the Beholder • Developer — Westwood Associates • Publisher — * Strategic Simulations, Inc. • Capcom (Super NES) • Sega (Sega CD) • Pony Canyon, Inc. (PC-98) • Director — Brett Sperry • Designer — * Phillip W. Gorrow • Eydie Laramore • Paul S. Mudra Joseph Bostic • Artist — * Rick Parks • Aaron E. Powell • Joseph B. Hewitt IV • Writer — Eydie Laramore • Composer — * Paul S. Mudra • PC-98: • Yuzo Koshiro • Shinji Hosoe • Sega CD: • Yuzo Koshiro • Motohiro Kawashima • Released — * 1991 (MS-DOS, Amiga) • 1992 (PC-98) • April 1994 (Super NES) • 4 May 1994 (Sega CD) • Genre — Dungeon crawler • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — MS-DOS, Amiga, Sega CD, Super NES, PC-98

The lords of the city of Waterdeep hire a team of adventurers to investigate an evil coming from beneath the city. The adventurers enter the city's sewer, but the entrance gets blocked by a collapse caused by Xanathar, the eponymous beholder. The team descends further beneath the city, going through Dwarf and Drow clans, to Xanathar's lair, where the final confrontation takes place. Once the eponymous beholder is killed, the player would be treated to a small blue window describing that the beholder was killed and that the adventurers returned to the surface where they were treated as heroes. Nothing else was mentioned in the ending and there were no accompanying graphics. This was changed in the later released Amiga version, which featured an animated ending.

• Illustration — Beginning of the game (DOS) As a first-person party-based dungeon crawler, Eye of the Beholder takes place in an underground environment rendered from a first-person perspective in pseudo-3D graphics. The design and gameplay are similar to Dungeon Master from 1987. The player controls four characters, initially, using a point-and-click interface to fight monsters. This can be increased to a maximum of six characters, by resurrecting one or more skeletons from dead non-player characters (NPCs), or finding NPCs that are found throughout the dungeons. The ability to increase the size of the player's party through recruiting NPCs was included in all three games in the Eye of the Beholder series. It was also possible to import a party from Eye of the Beholder into The Legend of Darkmoon or from The Legend of Darkmoon into Assault on Myth Drannor; thus, a player could play through all three games with the same party.

The graphics for the MS-DOS version were created using Deluxe Paint. Over 150 Adlib sound effects exist in the game's audio.

SSI sold 129,234 copies of Eye of the Beholder. By mid-1991, over 150,000 copies had been sold worldwide. The Eye of the Beholder series overall, including the game's two sequels, reached global sales above 350,000 units by 1996.

In January 1991, SSI participated in Computer Gaming Worlds Top Ad contest and their cover art for Eye of the Beholder came in first place among voting readers, despite the magazine publisher's objection to the piece. From February till October, SSI started up a contest "Beholder Bonus", which required players to find a bonus feature (easter egg) in each level of the game, indicated by an onscreen message. The first 50 PC players and 50 Amiga players to discover all 12 features would win $100 worth of prizes.

There were two sequels: Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon used a modified version of the first game's engine, added outdoor areas and greatly increased the amount of interaction the player had with their environment, along with substantially more 'roleplaying' aspects to the game. Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor was not developed by Westwood, the developer of Eye of the Beholder and The Legend of Darkmoon, but rather in-house by the publisher SSI. Eye of the Beholder Trilogy (1995, SSI) was a rerelease of all the three games for MS-DOS on CD-ROM. Interplay released the three games along with a number of other AD&D DOS Games in two collection CDs: The Forgotten Realms Archives (1997) and Gamefest: Forgotten Realms Classics (2001).

Several modules for Neverwinter Nights (2002) have been created by fans as remakes of the original Eye of the Beholder game. A team of Indie game developers led by Andreas Larsson did a fan conversion of the game for the Commodore 64 available for free as a cartridge image.