According to Jay Barnson, the former senior programmer of SingleTrac, the game did not start out as a platformer and had a completely different plot. Due to the Columbine massacre and the media's claims of the video game industry being partly to blame for the tragedy, Scholastic and K.A. Applegate, the author of the book series, asked for the game to be redesigned so that they could distance themselves from anything resembling "violent video games," even though the books themselves featured violence too.