PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale has been labelled a Super Smash Bros ripoff, since before the title was even revealed. This is because Battle Royale‘s concept is (at face value) virtually indistinguishable from Nintendo’s beloved brawler.

Some will be surprised to hear that All-Stars‘ initial ambitions strayed far from the alleged clone of Smash Bros that you see today.

In an interview with AusGamers, Battle Royale lead designer Omar Kendall, shed some light on the early aspirations surrounding All-Stars:

When I came on to [SuperBot Entertainment] it was right as they had decided they were going to make something with combat, with head-to-head as the central focus. I was definitely brought on for my expertise in that area. But before, and even the day I had set foot in the SuperBot (at that time Broodworks) office, it was like this team-based, four vs four, capture the flag style game, where each of the characters was an archetype.

Omar Kendall went on, detailing how this unique mode played out:

It was almost like you were making a new sport, where you had: if you imagine a football team, you have strikers, and you’ve got defenders. They had a similar approach to the character design, where there were certain characters that were really well suited to going after the flag, and there were certain characters that were well-suited toward defending the flag, and in between. It was actually a really interesting concept.

But, four vs four capture the flag, wasn’t the only gameplay type the team at SuperBot experimented with, Omar Kendall explains:

There was one sidescrolling adventure, where you were kind of stringing along narrative together, where different enemies would –and this is sort of where the foundation of the mash-up element of the game came from– where you could take individual enemies from different PlayStation games, and combine them with different levels from different PlayStation games to create these all-new experience as a hero who goes through a mashed up level with mashed up characters in it, and based on who you’d chose to bring along on your adventure, it would play out in different ways in real time.

Omar admitted, that a bevy of gameplay concepts were toyed with, but ultimately scrapped. The only constant throughout Battle Royale’s development, was the idea of uniting PlayStation’s mascots, in a fun, multiplayer experience.

Are you satisfied with the core mechanics surrounding PlayStation All-Stars? Or would you rather SuperBot took an approach more, or less, similar to Smash Bros?