Forgotten Realms: The Archives -- Collection One includes Eye of the Beholder, Eye of the Beholder II, and Eye of the Beholder III. These games were originally released between 1990 and 1993. The first two in the series were developed by Westwood Studios while the third was developed by Strategic Simulations who also published all three.

The first in the series sets a party of four characters off on an adventure under the city of Waterdeep to search for an unknown evil entity. Eventually the party may grow to six with the possible addition of two non-player characters. When exploring, the action is viewed from a first-person perspective in the upper left-hand side of the screen. The right side of the screen features pictures of the characters and below the action screen is a compass. Monsters roam each area and the game does not stop when a battle occurs. Instead, when a monster is in view of the party they can attack it.

Character races include human, dwarf, gnome, halfling, elf, and half-elf. Some of the classes to choose from are ranger, paladin, cleric, thief, and wizard. Multi-class characters can also be created. When adventuring characters must be kept fed. This is performed on the inventory screen of each character where rations can be placed on their plate. A meter bar is in place that represents how much food they have left.

Each of the other two games follows a similar format. Of course, new characters, locations, and monsters are added to them. The interface is also adjusted slightly in both sequels. For all three games the only information in the 420-page manual are a couple pages of technical information and the words for the copy protection system. There is no information on how to play the game, nothing about the story, and nothing about creating characters. The size of the manual is so large because it covers every game in each of the three archive collections. However, the actual manuals that were packaged with the original games can be found on the disc itself. ~ Jonathan Sutyak, All Game Guide