1991

Eye of the Beholder
Published: 1991
Publisher: SSI

Released in 1991, Eye of the Beholder was the first of SSI's AD&D computer role-playing games to take a fully first-person perspective. Based in the town of Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms, Eye of the Beholder allowed the player to select a party of four characters to bravely trudge through the sewers in search of a "great evil" (in the form of Xanathar, the eponymous beholder) that plagues the otherwise fair city.

Along with the first-person view of Eye of the Beholder came a totally new interface. Instead of sets of abstract lists, characters had paper-doll inventory screens upon which they could equip their weapons and armor. Encounters took place in pseudo-real-time against monsters who wandered the sewers and catacombs interspersed with simple, though occasionally annoying, puzzles of the flip-a-switch, drop-stone-on-pressure-plate variety.

Though Eye of the Beholder was well received, it did suffer from a number of problems, including the narrow, one-directional line of sight that didn't mesh well with real-time monsters (who tended to score free hits on the party from blind spots at the sides and rear); the cumbersome swapping of items and weapons - such as arrows and clerical holy symbols - from hand to backpack; and the lack of any real ending sequence once the final enemy was defeated.

Read CGW's review of Eye of the Beholder (80k graphic).

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