Super Mario All-Stars was developed by Nintendo Entertainment Analysis &

Development,[15] a former game development division of Japanese publisher Nintendo.

[16] It had the working title Mario Extravaganza as, according to Nintendo
president Satoru Iwata, "It was a single game cartridge packed full of the first
ten years of Nintendo's rich history."[17]

The idea for a compilation emerged after the completion of Super Mario Kart (1992).
[18] The next major Mario game, Yoshi's Island (1995), was still in production,
creating a gap in Nintendo's release schedule.[19] Mario creator Shigeru
Miyamoto[20] suggested developing a "value pack" containing all the Super Mario
games released until that point. According to Tadashi Sugiyama, who served as the
project's assistant director and designer, Miyamoto's idea was to give players a
chance to experience The Lost Levels.[18] Nintendo had deemed The Lost Levels,
released in Japan as Super Mario Bros. 2 in 1986, too difficult for the North
American market and instead released a retrofitted version of the game Doki Doki
Panic (1987) as the region's Super Mario Bros. 2.[21][22] As such, it had not
attracted much of an audience.[18] Rather than simply transferring the NES games
unedited to a SNES cartridge, Nintendo chose to remaster them in the transition
across platforms.[19]

One of the first tasks the developers accomplished was updating and reworking the
graphics for the SNES.[18] Because it was more powerful than the NES, they were no
longer restricted in the colors they could use to design Mario's world.[23]
Designer Naoki Mori recalled feeling intimidated, as it was only his third year at
Nintendo and he had been tasked with updating the company's flagship game.[18] The
artists based their designs on those from Super Mario World (1990) and added a
black outline around Mario to make him stand out against the backgrounds.[18][23]
For pitch-black backgrounds like those in castles and bonus areas in Super Mario
Bros., Mori and Sugiyama added details such as portraits of Bowser and Mario. The
team strove to retain the feel of the original games by leaving level designs and
Mario's movement unaltered. To preserve the gameplay, they chose not to add new
animations and actions.[23]

Alterations were done by hand, and Sugiyama ran the original Super Mario Bros.
while he worked on the remake so he could compare them side by side.[23] Staff who
worked on the original games were involved and consulted during development.[18]
Nintendo chose to leave certain glitches the team deemed helpful, such as an
infinite lives exploit in Super Mario Bros.. However, for that glitch, they set a
limit on how many lives the player could earn. Sugiyama recalled the team fixed
glitches they thought would interfere with players' progress, although fixing them
caused some differences in the controls. To make the games easier, Nintendo gave
players more lives when they started. The developers also added the option to save,
as battery backup cartridges did not exist when the original Super Mario Bros. was
created. The decision to have save points at the end of each level in The Lost
Levels was made to alleviate the game's difficulty. While he helped with the other
remakes, Mori avoided debugging The Lost Levels because it was so difficult.