Rod Land

1990 · Platform · Arcade

About Rod Land

Rod Land (1990) is Jaleco's single-screen arcade platformer in which two fairies with magic rods stun monsters and slam them from side to side until they vanish, a Bubble Bobble-style game best known in Europe through its home ports.

Rod Land in Depth

One or two players control the fairies Tam and Rit, armed with magic wands. Following Bubble Bobble's lead, the rod does not kill monsters outright but leaves them immobilised and crying; it can then grab them in a magic force field so the player can smash them against the ground from side to side until they disappear, leaving a power-up. Each level is a single small screen of monsters, platforms, ladders and later tunnels. Unlike most games of its kind, the fairies can never jump and must use ladders, but they can conjure one ladder of their own above or below them to reach another platform. Only one such ladder can exist at a time, so summoning it again makes the old one vanish, which can also knock away a monster climbing it.

The fairies set out to rescue their mother, trapped in a tower. The arcade version also contains a completely different second story, with new graphics, levels, bosses and more robotic enemies, in which they enter a pyramid to stop a demon building a mobile fortress, guided at times by the spirit of their dead father, whose death the ending implies the demon caused. It can be started directly by moving the joystick down three times between inserting a coin and pressing start.

Making Rod Land

Jaleco developed Rod Land and released it only in Japan in April 1990, but it was ported widely and released internationally. Random Access began the Amiga port, published by Storm, in March 1991 and released it that September. Weeserik told The One the conversion was "easier" than others because the Amiga could reproduce everything in the coin-op at the correct frame rate, though Jaleco supplied around five hundred sprites "jumbled up and in the wrong colours". The 16-bit versions added hidden features, codes and extra levels, and replaced some of the arcade's less suitable synthesised sound effects; Weeserik said they wrote them the way the arcade version should have been written. The Commodore 64 version was coded by Steve Snake and the Spectrum version by Jason McGann and Shaun McClure, and in the Game Boy version players can strike enemies while on ladders. A puzzle spin-off, Soldam, followed in 1992, and Hamster released the arcade original in Arcade Archives in January 2021.

Rod Land Trivia

The Sales Curve's London office made the home versions, from the Amstrad CPC in 1990 to the Game Boy in 1993.
The NES version, released only in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Japan, adds stages and lets the fairies jump.
The Amiga port found unused enemy animations in the data and used them to show monsters switching to attack mode.
Programmers Ronald Pieket Weeserik and John Croudy fixed arcade bugs such as slamming enemies on thin air.
Amiga Power ranked the Amiga version the 16th best game of all time.