In a new interview, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale lead designer Omar Kendall, has revealed that the game wasn’t always a Smash Bros. style brawler. In fact, according to Kendall, the title was originally nothing more than a vague idea in search of a game.

“Eventually [SCEA] decided on a PlayStation All-Stars type game—a broad concept of let’s take all of these great PlayStation characters and PlayStation universes and bring them together into a single game,” Kendall told Siliconera. “And then it became a question of what kind of game do we want to bring these characters in.”

Kendall went on to explain that the team originally began work on an entirely different concept for the title, and that work was still underway on this earlier prototype as recently as two years ago.

“The last version of the game before we settled on the current incarnation was this 4v4 capture the flag kind of game,” he said. “It was a class based game where you had fast runners who were good at capturing the flag and taking the flag back to base. You had defensive dudes. We were taking PlayStation characters and using them like archetypes.”

The final, non-capture-the-flag version of PlayStation All-Stars will be out on the PS3 and Vita on November 20th.