The first installment of the series. It was originally released for the Family Computer on February 9, 1989, and then ported to the Game Gear on July 26, 1991. The Famicom version was re-released on the Wii Virtual Console on September 2008.
The objective of the game is to reach the end of each action scene by making the best use of Wagan's sound wave attacks and jumping ability. The player must confront a boss at the end of certain stages, but instead of actually fighting the boss in battle, the player is challenged to a mini-game where they must score more points than their opponent. The graphics in this installment featured simple backgrounds with bright colors. The boss theme that was later used in Wagan Land 2 and Super Wagan Land was first used in this installment for the shiritori and concentration mini-games.
The Game Gear version of the Wagan Land is different from the Famicom version and the plot involves Wagan Land being attacked by Dr. Devil once again. In order to avoid the afterimage effect that was caused by playing action games on an LCD game at the time of the game's release, some of the stages were redesigned and others were replaced. New power-up items for the action scenes were also added that were previously introduced in Wagan Land 2 (which was released prior to the Game Gear version), as well as an hourglass that stops time during the mini-game segments. The Game Gear version lacks the ability of allowing the player to slowly descend into the ground by pressing the jump button while in mid-air, a features that has been included in the other games of the series.
Source: Wikipedia, "Wagan Land", available under the CC-BY-SA License.