Miyamoto interview reveals that he got his best Donkey Kong ideas while bathing, plus much more

The following comes from a Wired translation of a Nintendo interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...

- Miyamoto's best ideas for Donkey Kong were thought up when he was in the bath
- Donkey Kong was supposed to have human voice samples
- Miyamoto had nothing to do with the port of Donkey Kong to the Famicom, as that was left to another team
- Miyamoto wanted to have 7 games out at the Famicom launch, but there were only 3
- for Baseball, Golf and Tennis, Miyamoto worked on character design and the game design
- Miyamoto helped to hand-pick which colors the NES would support
- Miyamoto says creating Donkey Kong took 4 to 5 months
- work on the arcade game kept Miyamoto so busy that he called friends and said he would have to disappear for awhile
- at this time, Miyamoto was living in company-owned housing
- the house actually had a bath tub where employees working on Hanafuda cards could wash up before going home
- Miyamoto used to take baths in this tub late at night, since no one else was around
- during Donkey Kong's development, Nintendo was saying that ‘globalism is important’ and ‘we should think worldwide'
- Miyamoto said he listened to a lot of Nintendo of America’s opinions, but not all of them
- NoA told Miyamoto that Donkey wasn't another term for stupid, even though his dictionary said it was
- Miyamoto liked the sound of Donkey Kong, so he decided to ignore NoA and go ahead with the name anyway
- Miyamoto always thought of Mario as about 24 to 26 years old
- Miyamoto thought the story of Donkey Kong would help players decipher his age
- Mario kept Donkey Kong locked up, so he escaped with his girlfriend, pointing to Mario being a young guy, a bachelor
- the game was originally supposed to talk, with Pauline yelling out 'Help!' and 'Nice!' when Mario jumped barrels
- apparently the voice acting was hard to understand, so it was taken out
- “Help!” was replaced with Donkey Kong’s growl, and “Nice!” was replaced with the pi-ro-po-pon-pon! sound
- now the official onomatopoeia for Mario’s jumping sound is pi-ro-po-pon-pon!
- Miyamoto took a very serious approach to game development during Donkey Kong
- for example, if you fall 1.5 times Mario’s height, you die
- later he felt that making that decision hurt gameplay, which is why he removed it from Super Mario Bros.