Penguin Land

About Penguin Land

Penguin Land (1987) is Sega's puzzle-platformer in which a penguin guides a fragile egg down an icy cavern past polar bears, and the first home console game with battery-backed saving.

Penguin Land in Depth

Three penguin eggs are lost on a distant planet, and Penguin Mission Commander Overbite must guide them down a frigid cavern full of traps, enemies and secret passages to the spaceship crew waiting at the bottom. The aim is to push and drop an egg to the bottom of a vertically scrolling ice cavern: Overbite pushes it left and right, drops it onto lower platforms and melts ice blocks to clear a path. The egg breaks if it falls more than three blocks, or if Overbite lands on it when it cannot roll aside.

Blocks include meltable ice, cracked ice that melts once the egg rests on it, rocks that can be dropped on enemies but crack the egg if they land on it, stone blocks that occasionally move by themselves, and tubes for the egg or the penguin. Polar-bear-like Gangows attack Overbite and the egg, breaking it if they corner it or land on it, and Cameel birds drop bricks if the egg is left unmoved too long. Egg shields, springs, point and time bonuses and control-inverting ghosts also appear. There are 50 stages and a level editor that can store up to 15 extra levels in battery-backed RAM.

Making Penguin Land

Sega developed and published it for the Master System in 1987, the first home console game to include a battery backup save feature. It was reviewed by magazines including Computer and Video Games, The Games Machine and Power Play in 1988.