As a rule I’m not a great fan of RPGs, but there are always exceptions and Eye of the Beholder is one of them. This game ate up hours of my life at a time when I probably should have been revising for my GCSEs, as I painstakingly formed my party of adventurers and took them underground to discover what menaces lay beneath the city of Waterdeep.

What follows is a journey through around a dozen levels full of maze-like corridors, secret rooms, treasures, traps and all manner of hostile creatures, culminating in the duel with the eponymous Beholder. Westwood translated the Dungeons & Dragons rules into a great first-person adventure with real time combat and the ability to adopt new characters into your party as the game progresses.

To me EOTB signified the arrival of the PC as a true gaming platform, with vivid VGA graphics and sound card support giving depth and atmosphere to the proceedings. These days the visuals seem primitive, but at the time some of the creatures were quite terrifying, especially the huge spiders that you could hear creeping up on you.

The likes of Baldur’s Gate and World of Warcraft may have taken PC-based RPGs to far greater heights, but few would disagree that it all started here!