The following information comes a Kotaku interview with Matt Bozon, dreative director at WayForward, and Austin Ivansmith, director.

"Everything that was good about the original is still there. We used the original NES game as a template…about 60% follows the original perfectly, and then about 40% is new content. For the level design itself, it has to do with adding more of what was already there in the original NES game—some of the levels the a little short, you know? In a couple of spots, you might run into only one enemy type twice, and there's really mean enemies, and there's really mean puzzles there that we wanted to give the player more of that to experience.

We didn't create any new enemies, all the enemies are there, and a couple of them have a few lil' tricks to them that they didn't have before—like the skeleton duck leaves a skull behind and that becomes a puzzle mechanic you use…with some bosses, the bosses in the original game were really short, and you could beat them really quickly, and we sort of brought our WayForward flair to them and gave them more patterns, and a little more challenge, and really building on what their behaviors and patterns were in the original game."

- new final stage which takes place in Mt Vesuvius
- extreme difficulty that means you have to play the game straight through in one sitting
- compare your high score with your friends