Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder in 1991 dropped players on Amiga and PC into the sewers beneath Waterdeep, sending a party of adventurers ever deeper toward a final confrontation with Xanathar. Developed by Westwood Studios and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. under the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license, it borrowed its grid-based, first-person, real-time combat from Dungeon Master, but built the rest on AD&D rules: classes, spell schools, equipment and combat all followed the tabletop original far more closely than rival dungeon crawlers. The same year brought Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, which extended the story from the temple of Darkmoon down into the underworld to face a dracolich, adding trickier puzzles, more varied settings and better-balanced fights — many players still consider it the series' peak.

The third game, Assault on Myth Drannor (1993), was made without Westwood Studios, in-house at SSI, and it showed: the pacing slowed, the technology lagged behind the competition, and the reception was noticeably cooler than for the first two entries. That closed the series on PC, though the first two games later reached the Amiga as well. For many players Eye of the Beholder remains proof that a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons session could be translated faithfully to computer screens — alongside Dungeon Master, it helped define the dungeon-crawler genre at the turn of the 1990s, thanks in no small part to how closely it carried the tabletop ruleset onto the screen.