Donkey Kong Land, known in Japan as
The player travels through four worlds, alongside Donkey Kong Country and shortly before the cancellation of a Battletoads Arcade Game Boy port. Rare's co-founder, Tim Stamper, asked their 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 to those who had not purchased Donkey Kong Country. 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 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 started as just 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. 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 three steps forward at a third 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". In Japan, the game was released under the title Super Donkey Kong GB. Nintendo distributed Land in banana yellow cartridges, unlike other Game Boy games, which came in grey.
| award1Pub = GamePro
| award1 = Best Game Boy Game of 1995
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.