Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder is a popular role-playing game developed by Westwood Associates for Strategic Simulations Inc. It was released in 1991 for MS-DOS and Amiga. Later, it was also ported to SNES and SEGA CD.

The gameplay was like another iconic title, Dungeon Master. Still, thanks to the license from TSR, Eye of Beholder offered official D&D settings and rules based on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition (AD&D)—specifically the Forgotten Realms world and the famous city of Waterdeep. As you know, we are talking about a first-person dungeon crawler with movements in 4 directions in a pseudo-3D world. Combat is real-time, a real innovation that makes the game much more thrilling than other games with turn-based fighting.

We can readily admit that EOB is among the most iconic, influential, and fondly remembered titles for all RPG fans. The enemy, the beholder of the title, is the famous Xanathar, one of the most renowned villains of all D&D. It has been copied, homaged, and remade several times. A fan-made Commodore 64 version is also in progress.

The game's success produced two more titles, Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon and Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor.

The MS-DOS version you can download below includes the 1.9 unofficial patch, which fixes some wrong classes of NPCs and restores some items and rooms missing in the official 1.7 release.

If you are a fan of the Amiga version, don't forget to check Eye of the Beholder AGA.