Before Command & Conquer made Westwood a household name, the studio cut its teeth on something very different: a first-person dungeon crawl set beneath the sewers of Waterdeep.
Westwood Before Command & Conquer
Eye of the Beholder came out in 1991, developed by Westwood Associates and published by Strategic Simulations Inc. under license from TSR, using the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition ruleset and the Forgotten Realms setting. It was a technical showcase for its time — smooth, step-based real-time movement, a party-based combat system, and a twelve-level dungeon dense with secrets and hand-placed encounters. This was the game that put Westwood on the map before the studio pivoted toward the real-time strategy games it’s remembered for today, and its success led SSI to commission two sequels. Westwood didn’t stay attached to the series for long, though — after developing the first two Eye of the Beholder games, the studio moved on to other projects, and a different, external developer handled Eye of the Beholder III on a new engine. That handoff is part of why the third game feels noticeably different in pacing and presentation from the two Westwood originals, and why fans of the series tend to speak of the first two games as a matched pair distinct from the third.
It’s also worth remembering just how young Westwood was at this point. Eye of the Beholder came only a few years after the studio’s founding, back when it was still primarily known for ports and licensed RPG work rather than original design. The confidence on display here, in both the dungeon layout and the AD&D rules implementation, is a big part of why SSI kept coming back to Westwood for more first-person work throughout the early ’90s.
Descending Beneath Waterdeep
Your party of up to four adventurers (plus room for a couple of hirelings picked up along the way) heads into the sewers beneath Waterdeep to hunt down the ancient beholder Xanathar, who has been quietly corrupting the city’s underworld. Movement is step-based in a grid, but combat and enemies operate in real time, which means you can’t pause and calmly plan every move the way you could in a Gold Box game — you click on party members to attack whatever’s adjacent, position spellcasters to hang back and cast at range, and generally have to think on your feet.
Building a Party That Survives
- Bring at least one dedicated cleric. Healing is limited and resting isn’t always safe, so a character who can patch the party up on demand matters more here than in most Gold Box-style RPGs.
- Map as you go, even with in-game aids. The dungeon is full of teleporters, pressure plates, and hidden doors that are much easier to track if you keep your own notes on secret walls you’ve found.
- Push on suspicious walls. A lot of Eye of the Beholder’s secrets are hidden behind sections of wall that look just slightly different if you’re paying attention.
- Don’t rest in the open. Random encounters can and will interrupt a rest in an unsecured area, so clear a room out fully before you stop to recover spell points.
- Keep a mixed party of fighters, a cleric, and at least one arcane caster — AD&D’s class balance means a party of all-fighters will struggle against certain late encounters that basically require magic to deal with cleanly.
How It Compares to Dungeon Master and the Gold Box Games
Eye of the Beholder owes an obvious debt to FTL’s Dungeon Master, which pioneered the real-time, step-based first-person dungeon crawl a few years earlier — but EOB adds proper AD&D 2nd Edition rules and Forgotten Realms flavor on top of that formula, which Dungeon Master never had. Compared to SSI’s own Gold Box series (Pool of Radiance and its sequels), it trades the older wireframe, menu-driven combat for a much more immediate, real-time feel, at the cost of some of the Gold Box games’ tactical depth. It’s a fair trade for the atmosphere it buys you.
The Honest Downsides
It’s not a flawless game by modern standards. The step-based movement, once you’re used to smoother first-person games, can feel stiff, and mapping the twelve levels by hand (or relying on an imperfect memory) is a genuine time investment that not everyone will have the patience for today. A few late fights lean on ambushes that feel more like cheap shots than fair encounter design, and the inventory management, handled entirely through a small icon-based panel, gets cramped once you’re juggling scrolls, wands, and spare weapons for four characters at once. None of that stopped it from becoming enormously influential, but it’s worth going in with the expectations of a 1991 dungeon crawler rather than a modern RPG.
Playing It Today
Eye of the Beholder is a commercial title, so you’ll want a legitimate copy, whether that’s an original disk set or an official re-release. New to DOSBox in general? Our setup guide covers installation and configuration from the ground up. Once you’ve got your files, use mount c [folder] then c: to switch drives, and run EOB.EXE to launch. If you’re on a Sound Blaster-compatible setup, double-check your IRQ and DMA settings match what the game’s installer configured, since mismatched audio settings are the most common cause of silence or crashes on startup.
Watch Gameplay
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