DONKEY KONG LAND III

IAN MANDERS CODED THE THIRD AND FINEST DONKEY KONG LAND

How did you land the job of coding Donkey Kong Land 3 for Rare?

I started at Rare in 1994 and my first project was the SNES game Ken Griffey Jr’s Winning Run. After that finished in early 1996, I was assigned to work on Donkey Kong Land 3. It used the same engine that Rob Harrison wrote from the ground up for Donkey Kong Land 2, but with lots of new gameplay features, as well as new map screens and bonus games.

What were the main challenges you faced from a coding perspective?

It was a new platform, to me, so I had to get up to speed with a different CPU, and the tighter constraints of the Game Boy – slower speed, less memory and the small pages of the Game Boy cartridges. It was an interesting challenge, though, and the immediacy of working with portable platforms resonated with me. For most of my career since that point I’ve developed software for portable games consoles and mobile phones.

The first two Donkey Kong Land games are quite close to their big brother SNES versions, whereas Donkey Kong Land 3 does deviate from Donkey Kong Country 3. Was this a conscious decision?

We weren’t given any significant directives one way or another and we were generally left to get on with it. Most attention at that time was paid to the Nintendo 64 games in development. We had the benefit of having a good starting point in the existing engine, so that gave us some breathing room to add some original elements.

The original Game Boy’s monochrome screen wasn’t amazing. Was there much you could do as a coder to improve clarity?

I think that was mostly in the hands of the artist. I don’t remember having much influence over that. The artist, Keri Gunn, had lots of experience with creating great Game Boy graphics so it was in capable hands. The first Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy reportedly sold in huge numbers. Were you privy to how well your sequel sold? I remember hearing that Donkey Kong Land 3 sold more than a million, which was great to hear for only the second game I’d worked on.