Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 26, 2025
Donkey Kong Land is a platform game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy (pictured). Released on June 26, 1995, it condenses the side-scrolling gameplay of Donkey Kong Country with different level design and boss fights. The player controls Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong as they recover their stolen banana hoard from King K. Rool. Development began in 1994: Rare's Game Boy programmer, Paul Machacek, developed Land as an original game rather than a port of Country, believing it would be a better use of resources. 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. Critics praised it as successfully translating Country's gameplay, visuals, and music to the Game Boy. Land was rereleased for the Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo Switch. (Full article...)