The First Samurai was originally released in September 1991 for the Amiga and Atari ST,[1] and was later ported to the Commodore 64, MS-DOS and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Eating food and drinking sake will help the player get stronger, while fire and enemy contact will weaken the samurai.

The player starts out as a hermit in an ancient forest, but eventually becomes powerful enough to fight in the villages and the towns, and after awhile, the dungeons.

The First Samurai began development in July 1990, and was originally scheduled for a September 1991 release for Amiga and Atari ST, with an MS-DOS port stated to be 'unplanned' at the time.

"[1] The First Samurai's development was described by The One as "an ongoing creative process in which everyone is encouraged to participate", and Dinc expressed "Deciding on sprites and backgrounds that everybody is happy with can be time-consuming.

"[1] The balance between easy-to-learn controls and allowing the player an array of different attacks was an important factor in The First Samurai's design, and Twiddy stated that "The main thing is to get lots of manoeuvres in there.

[1] Vivid Image deliberately chose a "fairly long" development period according to The One, and Cecco expressed that "We want to make certain there's plenty of time at the end for tweaking.

The magazine praises First Samurai's graphics, calling them "gorgeously colourful" and noting the game to be "full of fantastic minute details (e.g. the sword sparkles!

)", furthermore expressing that it has "great parallax-scrolling, fancifully animated sprites and a very impressive explosion when the hero dies."

Furthermore, it mentions First Samurai's "nifty" title screen music and "comical" sound effects, and concludes by stating "It is clear that the programmers at Image Works have put care into the game and successfully created a masterpiece ...

[10] A revival of the game was announced in 1998 for the Nintendo 64, and it entered early planning stages of development, but was cancelled shortly after, and never released in any capacity.