According to the manual, the whole game was made because Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong had a bet with Cranky Kong that they could have fun even without "fancy graphics" and "modern music" like in Donkey Kong Country.

There was originally going to be a new Animal Buddy called "Ram Bunkshus" to appear in this game. Little is known about what he could do and why he never made it into the game.

During the development of Donkey Kong Land, Nintendo tasked Rare to see what they could develop for the Virtual Boy, leading to the development of a port of Donkey Kong Country 2 using sprites from Donkey Kong Land. This happened just after the launch of the Virtual Boy and was only in the early planning stages for a matter of weeks before it was cancelled due to console's commercial and critical failure.

Within the game's coding is a string under the name "PFLOYD" that maintains the integrity of the game's save files. This string appears in the English and Japanese ROMS under the offset 6F7A and needs to be present at AA00, AA40, and AA80 in RAM (along with two checksums) in order for save files to remain functional; if the string is not present in one of these RAM files, the corresponding save file will be wiped, even if the two checksums are cleared.

The name of the string, "PFLOYD", appears to be a reference to the British progressive rock band Pink Floyd, who was active from 1965 to 1996, disbanding just a year after Donkey Kong Land's release.

Donkey Kong Land's boss battle theme was repurposed for the Skerries stage in Blast Corps, a Nintendo 64 game also developed by Rare and also composed by Graeme Norgate. According to an interview with Norgate, he claims that he reused the track "through laziness", though he also admits that he couldn't remember why. This track was removed from the Rare Replay release of Blast Corps in 2015 to avoid any legal issues with Nintendo, who have since retained the rights to all of Rare's Donkey Kong games and content, but was re-instated in the Nintendo Switch Online release of the game in 2024.