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 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 four 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. 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, Diddy is faster, and the player can swap between them at will. They jump between platforms, stomp on enemies, swing on vines, and avoid obstacles. The story begins after Cranky Kong challenges Donkey and Diddy to replicate Donkey Kong Country's success on the Game Boy's 8-bit hardware and coaxes King K. Rool and the Kremlings into stealing their banana hoard again.

Release Date 1995-06-26

Japanese Release Date 1995-07-27

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