| The game has eight worlds; Miyamoto says warps let a good player go from World 1 straight to World 8, to reach the end. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |
| Miyamoto says the warps came from Excitebike's arcade version, which let a player choose which of its three levels to start on: since a cartridge couldn't save, a good player could skip ahead instead of playing from the start every time. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |
| Nintendo names the game's original developers as Shigeru Miyamoto, who wrote its specifications; Takashi Tezuka, a designer in his first year at Nintendo when the first plans were drawn up; Toshihiko Nakago, president of SRD, the contractor whose programmers built it; and Koji Kondo, whom Miyamoto appointed to sound. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |
| Miyamoto says he set out to make something like his arcade Mario Bros. (1983), which didn't scroll and had a black background, but scrolling, bright, and with bigger characters. Scrolling cost Mario Bros.' simultaneous two-player play. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |
| The game drew on Nintendo's earlier ones. Its specification lists refinements of Donkey Kong's slopes, lifts, conveyor belts, and ladders, Donkey Kong Jr.'s ropes, logs, and springs, and Mario Bros.' enemies, frozen platforms, and POW Blocks. Iwata says the scrolling came from Excitebike and the large characters from Devil World, and Nakago that SRD's makers of Donkey Kong Jr.'s springs brought them in. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |
| Miyamoto says that, a year before the Disk System, the team meant it to be their last cartridge game, and packed in as much as they could to show what Nintendo could do with one. In another interview Izuhiko Imanishi recalled him making it on cartridge on purpose against the expectation of the Disk System, and Masayuki Uemura disputed it. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |
| Iwata says the game used 256-kilobit memory at first, and Miyamoto that its characters stayed at 64 kilobits. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |
| At the end of development the team used up the spare bytes usually left for bug fixes: with 20 bytes left, Miyamoto added a crown as a reward for ten or more extra lives, and with eight left, more blocks. | Vol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand CulminationVol. 5, p. 3, The Grand Culmination | Interview |