Classic 1989 Miyamoto interview looks at dev team size, Miyamoto's basic concept for Mario

The following interview snippets come from a 1989 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, as conducted in TV Game: denshi yuugi taizen...

Q: How many people do you usually have on a development team?

Miyamoto: From 6-12 people. For our recent games with a lot of content, we need assistants, people to create the maps, etc… so the size of our teams is gradually increasing. For Super Mario Bros., I believe we had 8 people.

Q: What was your basic concept for Super Mario Bros? I’ve heard the basic idea was to make a platformer that used the Mario character.

Miyamoto: From a marketing standpoint, the idea was to make a game that anyone could enjoy, yet would also appeal to game maniacs. At the planning stage, we talked about wanting to make a game that would compile the best aspects of post-Donkey Kong platformers, and also set a new standard. We all thought it was going to be our final celebration of cartridge games… we had a lot of fun making it.