Over the years, as the number of titles published increased and the volume of past stories accumulated, it became increasingly difficult to maintain internal consistency. In the face of diminishing sales, maintaining the status quo of their most popular characters became attractive. Although retcons were used as a way to explain apparent inconsistencies in stories written, editors at DC came to consider the varied continuity of multiple Earths too difficult to keep track of, and feared that it was an obstacle to accessibility for new readers. To address this, they published the cross-universe miniseries "Crisis on Infinite Earths" in 1985, which merged universes and characters, reducing the Multiverse to a single unnamed universe with a single history.