The game was first released on the Atari ST, and was later for the Commodore 64, Macintosh, Amiga, Apple IIGS, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Thomson TO8 / MO6.

Other unique facets of the gameplay included changes in the player interface as the game progressed; as time wore on, the character's health deteriorated.

This was represented in-game via an increasing amount of shaking of the mouse cursor, making the game more and more difficult to control.

The player must successfully navigate the probe over a fractal landscape, eventually reaching the alien at the end of a valley.

The UPCOM interface then appears so that the player may talk to the alien and find out more information—most importantly, the coordinates of other inhabited planets.

[1] After ERE's absorption by Infogrames in the summer of 1987 (partly justified by preliminary versions of Captain Blood), Ulrich and Bouchon isolated themselves in the Landes in order to have the game ready for Christmas.

Many adaptations for both 16-bit and 8-bit machines were developed in successive months, although they were straight ports of the original Atari ST version in graphics, sound effects or music.

[2] Orson Scott Card praised Captain Blood's EGA graphics and science-fiction story, but wrote in Compute!