Donkey Kong Land

''Donkey Kong Land'' is a 1995 platform game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy. It condenses the side-scrolling gameplay of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game ''Donkey Kong Country'' (1994) for the handheld Game Boy. The player controls the gorilla Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong as they defeat enemies and collect items across 30 levels to recover their stolen banana hoard from the crocodile King K. Rool. Although the gameplay is similar to ''Country'', ''Land'' features original level design and boss fights.

Development began in 1994, before ''Donkey Kong Country'' completion, and lasted a year. Rare's Game Boy programmer, Paul Machacek, developed ''Land'' as an original game rather than as a port of ''Country'' after convincing Rare co-founder Tim Stamper it would be a better use of resources. Like ''Country'', ''Land'' features pre-rendered graphics converted to sprites through a compression technique. Rare retooled ''Country'' gameplay to account for the lower quality display, and David Wise and Graeme Norgate converted the soundtrack to the Game Boy's sound chip.

''Donkey Kong Land'' was released in mid-1995. It sold four million copies and received positive reviews. Critics praised it as successfully translating ''Country'' gameplay, visuals, and music to the Game Boy, though they disagreed over whether it was an equal experience. ''Land'' was followed by ''Donkey Kong Land 2'' (1996), ''Donkey Kong Land III'' (1997), and a Game Boy Color version of ''Country'' (2000), which attempted to replicate the SNES ''Country'' games more closely. ''Land'' and its sequels were rereleased for the Nintendo 3DS via the Virtual Console service in 2014.

Gameplay

As a handheld companion to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game ''Donkey Kong Country'' (1994), ''Donkey Kong Land'' features similar gameplay: it is a side-scrolling platform game in which the player controls the gorilla Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong across 30 levels. Donkey is stronger, while Diddy is faster, and the player can swap between them at will. The story begins after Cranky Kong challenges Donkey and Diddy to replicate ''Donkey Kong Country'' success on 8-bit hardware and gets King K. Rool and the Kremlings to steal their banana hoard again. While some level themes, such as jungles and coral reefs, are borrowed from ''Country'', others, such as cliffs and clouds, are original, and the level design and bosses are different.

The player travels through four worlds, their progress tracked by a world map. They jump between platforms, stomp on enemies, swing on vines, and avoid obstacles. Levels are populated by collectible bananas, barrel-shaped cannons, hidden bonus stages, throwable items, and letters spelling K–O–N–G that save the player's progress. Some levels feature two animal companions, the rhino Rambi and the ostrich Expresso, who provide the Kongs with special abilities. Each world ends in a boss fight. The player starts with a limited number of lives, which are lost if they fall down a bottomless pit or are damaged by an enemy. The player can earn extra lives by collecting balloons or 100 bananas.

Development

Rare began working on ''Donkey Kong Land'' for the Game Boy in 1994, alongside ''Donkey Kong Country'' and shortly before the cancellation of a '' Battletoads Arcade'' Game Boy port. Rare's co-founder, Tim Stamper, asked the Game Boy programmer Paul Machacek to port ''Donkey Kong Country'' to the Game Boy. Machacek convinced Stamper it would be better to develop a similar but original game, as he had with the Game Boy version of ''Battletoads'' (1991). He reasoned it would not take much more effort and would expand the audience beyond those who had not purchased the original. After Machacek spent roughly three weeks updating the Game Boy ''Battletoads'' game engine to handle a ''Donkey Kong'' game, development began and lasted a year.

Like ''Country'', ''Land'' features pre-rendered graphics converted to sprites through Rare's Advanced Computer Modelling (ACM) compression technique. Although the Game Boy is considerably less powerful than the SNES, its basic architecture is similar; this allowed Machacek to easily transfer ''Country'' artwork to ''Land'' and the artists to use the same PowerAnimator tools for new ACM assets. The project pushed the Game Boy to its limits, as Rare's decision to construct levels with slopes, rather than square tiles like other Game Boy games, and animate collectibles required a greater ROM size. The limitations meant only one player character could appear on-screen at a time and that Rare had to reduce the number of bonus stages and animal companions.

''Land'' team began with only Machacek but grew to over 15. They worked separately from the teams that developed the ''Country'' games for the SNES, and designed levels using a spare Silicon Graphics workstation with a custom level editor. Machacek spent considerable time trying to authentically re-create ''Country'' gameplay. To account for the Game Boy's smaller and slower display, the team did not re-use level layouts from ''Country'', made boss fights more predictable, and gave Expresso the ability to defeat enemies. They positioned the K–O–N–G letters as the save feature to make completing the game easier. Machacek said that replicating ''Country'' on the Game Boy did not stop the team from expanding on its design and world as the teams developing '' Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest'' (1995) and '' Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble'' (1996) for the SNES did. They added new locales to incorporate game mechanics that distinguished ''Land'' from ''Country''.

The soundtrack was composed by David Wise and Graeme Norgate, who worked to convert Wise's ''Country'' soundtrack to the Game Boy's sound chip. Norgate, who described ''Land'' as his most upbeat work, wrote original tracks to fit the new locales' atmosphere. It was his first Game Boy project and the system's technical restrictions forced him to focus on melodies. He said Wise helped teach him as they worked together: "He'd drip feed me little tricks to improve the overall sound. 'You can repeat the melody 3 steps forward at a 3rd of the volume to emulate an echo', and voila, your lead melody now has a lovely tight delay that makes it sound a lot wider and smoother".

Release

Like ''Donkey Kong Country'', ''Donkey Kong Land'' was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June 1994 and promoted through Nintendo's Play It Loud! marketing campaign. It was released in North America on 26 June 1995, in Japan on 27 July, and in Europe on 24 August. In Japan, the game was released under the title ''Super Donkey Kong GB''. Nintendo distributed ''Land'' in yellow cartridges, unlike other Game Boy games, which came in gray ones. ''Land'' was one of several games optimised for the Super Game Boy, a peripheral allowing Game Boy cartridges to be played on a SNES; playing it through the Super Game Boy adds additional colour palettes and a jungle-themed border. ''Donkey Kong Land'' sold four million copies, making it the bestselling ''Donkey Kong'' game for a Game Boy console.

Reception

''Donkey Kong Land'' received positive reviews and was named the best Game Boy game of 1995 by ''GamePro''. Critics considered it a successful translation of ''Country'' gameplay to the Game Boy and wrote that players who enjoyed the SNES game would also enjoy ''Land''. ''Diehard GameFan'' and ''Electronic Gaming Monthly'' highlighted the new levels, mechanics, and locales, and ''The Electric Playground'' said the controls were tight and responsive. ''GamePro'' said that despite the technical limitations and smaller scope, ''Land'' was "a formidable effort considering what it accomplishes on a portable system", with lengthy levels and challenging gameplay.

Reviewers praised the visuals, impressed by Rare's effort to preserve ''Country'' pre-rendered art style. ''GameFan'' and '' Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine'' called it one of the best-looking Game Boy games with detail unprecedented for the system, and ''Computer and Video Games'' (''CVG'') said the visuals and animations were still excellent despite lacking ''Country'' fidelity. Conversely, ''The Electric Playground'' said the visuals, while great, highlighted the Game Boy's limitations, as its monochromatic screen occasionally made it difficult to comprehend the gameplay. ''GamePro'' agreed that the Game Boy's screen did not do the visuals justice. Some critics recommended playing ''Land'' on the Super Game Boy for adding colour and making the visuals easier to discern.

Opinions differed as to how ''Land'' compared to ''Country'' and the rest of the Game Boy's library. Some critics considered ''Land'' equal to ''Country'' (''CVG'' calling it superior), while others called it lesser. ''Game Players'' felt that while ''Land'' played as well as ''Country'', ''Country'' visuals were what made it special, so ''Land'' was merely a solid, but standard, experience. Several called ''Land'' one of the best Game Boy games, but ''The Electric Playground'' said it was not as inventive, satisfying, or original as the 1994 Game Boy ''Donkey Kong''. Still, they felt it was one of the Game Boy's best platformers and a necessary purchase. The music and sound were praised as among the Game Boy's best. ''The Electric Playground'' said they were near-perfect translations of ''Country'', and ''GameFan'' said they sounded on par with a SNES game when played through the Super Game Boy.

Legacy

Following ''Donkey Kong Land'' release, Michael Teitelbaum wrote a children's book adaptation, ''Rumble in the Jungle''. ''Land'' received three follow-up games: the sequels ''Donkey Kong Land 2'' (1996), based on ''Diddy's Kong Quest'', and ''Donkey Kong Land III'' (1997), based on ''Dixie Kong's Double Trouble''; and a Game Boy Color port of ''Donkey Kong Country'' (2000), which re-uses ''Land'' graphics and audio. The follow-ups attempted to replicate the SNES ''Country'' games more closely—particularly ''Land 2'', which journalists described as more of a downscaled port of ''Diddy's Kong Quest'' than an original game. The ''Land'' trilogy was rereleased for the Nintendo 3DS via the Virtual Console service in 2014.

Retrospective reviewers considered ''Donkey Kong Land'' a technical achievement. ''Nintendo Life'' and ''Nintendo World Report'' felt Rare successfully replicated ''Country'' art style on the Game Boy and praised the music, which ''Nintendo Life'' considered among the Game Boy's best, and gameplay. However, ''Polygon'' wrote that the developers "were so preoccupied with whether they ''could'' eplicate ''Country'' graphicsthey forgot to ask if they ''should''. The rich visuals of the Super NES games become completely illegible on Game Boy... a blurry grey soup of pixel-junk". ''Nintendo Life'' said that enemies blending with the background made ''Land'' needlessly difficult and lamented the absence of the Super Game Boy enhancements in the 3DS rerelease.

''Polygon'' ranked ''Donkey Kong Land'' and its sequels among the lesser ''Donkey Kong'' games, while ''Nintendo Life'' ranked it towards the middle. In a 2018 interview, Machacek said that of the games he worked on, ''Donkey Kong Land'' remained among his favourites. Some of ''Land'' levels, such as K. Rool's pirate ship, would be featured in subsequent ''Donkey Kong'' games. It also established a tradition of ''Donkey Kong'' games being distributed in yellow cartridges, which its sequels and ''Donkey Kong 64'' (1999) would continue.

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External links

Official website
at the Internet Archive
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{{Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong platform games
Game Boy games
Rare (company) games
1995 video games
Platform games
Virtual Console games
Video games scored by Graeme Norgate
Video games scored by David Wise
Virtual Console games for Nintendo 3DS
Video games developed in the United Kingdom