Alex Kidd in Miracle World was originally planned as a Dragon Ball title
Alex Kidd in Miracle World was intended to be SEGA’s answer to Super Mario Bros. Yet even before that, there was a very different plan in mind for the project.
Kotaro Hayashida, who created Alex Kidd, revealed in the new Untold History of Japanese Game Developers book that the game started out as a Dragon Ball title. However, SEGA was forced to make a major change when it lost the license. Hayashida said that when the project restarted, that’s when the team “started thinking about Mario, and looking for ways in which to differentiate the title from it.”
Hayashida’s full words:
Sega were planning on making a Dragon Ball game… I guess this happened long enough ago that it’s okay for me to talk about this! The project began as a Dragon Ball title, not as a direct competitor to Super Mario Bros.
But when we were told we could not use the Dragon Ball licence any more, we were forced to come up with our own ideas instead. For example, when it was Dragon Ball, Goku fought with his Power Pole, but we changed that to a punch attack. It was only after we came up with the plan to restart the project as Alex Kidd in Miracle World that we started thinking about Mario, and looking for ways in which to differentiate the title from it.
