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Donkey Kong Land
| Donkey Kong Land | |
|---|---|
 North American box art | |
| Developer(s) | Rare |
| Publisher(s) | Nintendo |
| Programmer(s) | Paul Machacek |
| Composer(s) | |
| Series | Donkey Kong |
| Platform(s) | Game Boy |
| Release | |
| Genre(s) | Platform |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Donkey Kong Land[a] 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 with different level design and boss fights. 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.
Development began in 1994, before Donkey Kong Country's 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's 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 3.91 million copies and received positive reviews. Critics praised it as successfully translating Country's 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, and on Nintendo Switch via its online service in 2024.
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