Wonder Boy in Monster Land - Development

Development

Wonder Boy in Monster Land was created by Ryuchi Nishizawa and Michishisto Ishizuka, two of the three members of a newly-found company called Escape. After the release of the first Wonder Boy game, they rebranded the company as "Westone" – as the first letter in Nishizawa's name means "west", while the first on Ishizuka's name means "stone". Nishizawa, originally an arcade game developer, was trying to take advantage of the quickly-emerging role-playing video game genre, with games such as The Black Onyx, Wizardry, and Dragon Quest. He tried to create a game that fused together arcade and RPG elements. The jungle backdrop was overhauled and replaced with a medieval one with castles and caves. As with RPGs, he intended for the player to start with no items or strength, and for players to buy items, spells, health, and better equipment. Later in the game's development, Shinichi Sakamoto came on board to compose its soundtrack; in an overview of the series by IGN, they said that the music "was a sigh of relief for those still haunted by the repetitive loops of the arcade original", adding that it contributed to the RPG style and that would establish the standard for all future Wonder Boy games in the series.

The game would be published by Sega in 1987 and released for the arcade. It ran on a Sega System 2 board. It was based on a Z80 processor that runs at 4 MHz, with audio provided by two SN76489 (also known as SN76496) chips that run at 4 MHz each. It used raster standard graphics and monaural sound. Upon its release for the arcades in Japan in 1987, Wonder Boy: Monster Land had slow sales, but it would eventually pick up to become a decent seller. Sega ported the game to its Master System console in 1988, where in Japan it was titled Super Wonder Boy: Monster World. It was also ported by Activision for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum in 1989. The Activision-published version bore the title of Super Wonder Boy in Monster Land on their packaging artwork. Hudson Soft released a version of the game titled Super Adventure Island for mobile phones on June 8, 2005 (2005-06-08). The Master System version was released for the Wii's Virtual Console service in Japan on December 14, 2008 (2008-12-14), in Europe on January 23, 2009 (2009-01-23), and in North America on January 26, 2009 (2009-01-26). Sega release the arcade version for the Virtual Console, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade – along with The Revenge of Shinobi, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the Arcade port of Super Hang-On, Monster World IV, and Wonder Boy in Monster World – as part of its third Sega Vintage Collection package in May 2012.

Wonder Boy in Monster Land has been cloned, hacked and re-marketed a number of times over the years with varying degrees of legality. Jaleco released a modified port of the game to the Family Computer, changing the graphics and character sprites so that it resembled the Chinese novel Journey to the West. They titled the game Saiyūki World, changed its protagonist to Sun Wukong, and changed the setting to Ancient China; they released the game on November 11, 1988 (1988-11-11). This game would have a sequel called Saiyūki World 2 in Japan and Whomp 'Em in North America. Similarly, Hudson Soft ported a version of Wonder Boy: Monster Land titled Bikkuriman World, where they changed the graphics and characters to those from the Bikkuriman anime franchise. They released the game for the PC Engine on October 30, 1987 (1987-10-30) and for the Famicom on July 27, 1990 (1990-07-27). Tectoy, Sega's distributor in Brazil, used the game's license and code to produce Mônica no Castelo do Dragão for the Sega Master System in 1989. Here, the characters were replaced with known figures from the Brazilian comic book series Monica's Gang (Turma da Mônica), and Monica was re-cast as the game's main character. The game is considered the only legal remake of any game in the Wonder Boy series.