Miyamoto/Tezuka/Kondo discuss Super Mario Bros. 1/3 dev, talk cut ideas and content

The following comes from an internal interview at Nintendo with Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka and Koji Kondo...

- Miyamoto's goal with Super Mario Bros. was to make the ‘grand finale of Famicom carts’
- Super Mario Bros. was the debut of Koji Kondo as a sound designer
- work done on Devil World and Excitebike helped pave the way for Super Mario Bros.
- Super Mario Bros. was considered the 'grand finale' of Famicom carts due to it using all the knowledge devs had learned from making other games up to that point
- Super Mario Bros. gameplay goal was to be a game where a big character could run & jump around in a fairly large course
- you could originally only play as big Mario
- while developing the game, the team thought it would be more fun if you could see farther ahead into a level
- you couldn't see too far due to Mario's large size, but this desire to see further made the devs come up with small Mario
- the idea of small and big Mario were all planned out on a white board
- this idea of changing from small to big is why the game ended up being called Super Mario
- the dev team on Super Mario Bros. 3 originally wanted to have an overhead, isometric view
- the dev team just couldn't make this idea work, especially since it was hard to judge jumping on enemies
- the checkered floor in the game is a remnant of the old isometric view
- there was worry that people wouldn't like the raccoon and Tanooki suits
- the team had trouble making Mario fly, but eventually got things right and gave that ability to the Raccoon suit
- the idea for flying in the game had been around since the first title, but wasn't implemented until the third
- development on the game took 2.5 years
- the first Mario game had 7 to 8 dev members, while the third had 20 to 30 devs
- every day the map programmers would pack themselves into a long, narrow conference room, and work on coding
- Kondo had a lot of trouble deciding what direction to take with the music for Super Mario Bros. 3
- Kondo made two overworld themes and had Miyamoto/Tezuka decide which one was better