Vintage Video Games #27 – Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder is a role-playing video game developed by Westwood Associates and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in 1990: originally for the PC and later to the Amiga, the Sega CD, Game Boy Advance and the SNES. Eye of the Beholder featured a first-person perspective in a three-dimensional dungeon. 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 of the dead non-player characters bone remains or finding NPCs that are found throughout the dungeons.

Plot:

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 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.

Highlights:

Firstly playing this game as a 9 year old girl … EOTB was terrifying! Adrenaline pumping, edge of your seat stuff, the player soon gets immersed in the sewers or Waterdeep and it’s hideous inhabitants.

How to play:

Get you SNES Emulator HERE
Get your EOTB ROM HERE

About the Author

Fifties Born in an irish field - dj, designer, radio show host and blogger Louise 'Fifties' O'Donnell went out into the world with one mission in mind. To hunt down big phat bass lines and share them with the masses. Dedicated to finding new music she is always on the trail of new talent as well as the big playas.