The Bell at the
End of the World:
Little Samson at Thirty-Three

The rarest NES cartridge most collectors will never afford, Little Samson is also — quietly, stubbornly — one of the finest action platformers the console ever produced. It deserves to be played, not merely priced.

There is a version of history in which Little Samson is a household name. In that version, a Taito marketing executive in 1992 makes a different decision, prints more cartridges, spends money on advertising, and the game lands with the impact its quality warranted. Instead, we got the version we have: a game so obscure that a complete boxed copy now commands nearly six thousand dollars on the collector's market, and a factory-sealed one approaches twenty thousand. Almost nobody bought it when it was new. Almost nobody has played it since.

This is a genuine loss, and it has almost nothing to do with the game itself. Little Samson was developed by Takeru, a small studio staffed largely by veterans of Capcom — including director Shinichi Yoshimoto, who had previously worked on Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Strider. That lineage is audible and visible in every frame. The combat is precise. The level design is generous without being indulgent. The boss encounters are spectacular — huge, expressive creatures that dwarf the player in ways the NES hardware had no business producing in 1992. This is what a decade of Capcom discipline looks like when a team is finally free to make exactly the game they want.

"A tour de force of excellent game design, attractive graphics and pure entertainment value — one of the best games for the NES." — AllGame

The structure is elegant. Four heroes — Samson the bell-wielder, Kikira the dragon, Gamm the living stone golem, and K.O. the bomb-setting mouse-wizard — each introduced across their own opening stage before becoming freely interchangeable. The game can be completed with Samson alone, but the real pleasure is in reading each encounter and selecting accordingly: the dragon for aerial sections, the golem for absorbing punishment, the mouse for threading through tight passages no one else can navigate. It is a character-switching system that feels ahead of its time, and it sustains interest across a playtime short enough to respect yours.

The game's commercial failure has a tragicomic explanation. In Japan it was known as Seirei Densetsu Lickle — Holy Bell Legend — a title that captures its spirit precisely. For Western release, Taito renamed it Little Samson. It has been reasonably speculated that American buyers, browsing NES shelves in late 1992 with the SNES already on the market, saw the word "Samson" and assumed a biblical edutainment title — a category reliably associated with some of the worst games ever made. Taito produced perhaps ten thousand copies. They sold poorly. The cartridges sat. The studio dissolved.

The rights situation became its own strange coda. For decades, nobody was entirely sure who owned Little Samson. When Limited Run Games set about arranging a re-release, they contacted Taito — who suggested the rights "might be with the owner." They tracked down the owner. The owner did not know they held the rights. The game is finally coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC in 2026, thirty-three years after it quietly arrived and departed. It is, in its way, the most NES story possible: a masterpiece that slipped through every crack available to it, finally being hauled back into the light by sheer force of retroactive appreciation.