In a 2018 interview with Kotaru Hayashida, it was revealed that the Alex Kidd franchise was originally envisioned as an adaptation of the popular 1984 manga Dragon Ball. However, because Sega lost the license to the comic partway through development, they had to refocus the first game into an original IP. Among other changes, Goku was redesigned into a lookalike of his inspiration, Chinese literary character Sun Wukong, and his Nyoi-Bo staff attack was replaced with a simple punch.