Originally, the game was meant to have an all-star cast of Nintendo characters, plus characters from other games. Hideki Kamiya came up with the gameplay as a way to satisfy fans of all the different characters, as different gamers would prefer certain characters over others. As such, he decided to make all the characters appear at once, so that the fans could pick and chose which character to use. After the game was shelved for some time, it was decided to drop the all-star Nintendo cast to create an all new superhero cast.