I got my first console, a Nintendo 64, in 1999 when I was five, and with it came a healthy collection of family-centric Mario games. My dad had an old NES that was mostly collecting dust in the basement after he showed me a few rounds of Duck Hunt, but the Nintendo 64 was the first time I felt like I wasn’t playing Dad’s games, I was playingmine. And though I loved my solo adventuring games, as soon as we got the red-yellow-white plugs sorted and the smooth, jazzy intro to Mario Kart 64 played in our living room for the first time, my family began what would become a regular routine of playing party games on the N64 together.
The character choices were never actual choices, as everyone had their established regular picks. My dad was Mario, the classic, while Mom chose Wario because her favorite color is yellow. My younger brother’s player-two status in games cemented him as Luigi, which carried over even into the party games, and I was Peach because she was the girl.
For as much as I loved Peach, though, I jumped ship to Daisy as soon as she was an option, finding my childhood self in this loud-mouthed dark-haired tomboy. She was every bit the princess that Peach was, but she seldom found herself in need of rescue. Peach holds the crown (pun intended) for being one of the most-featuredfictionalfemales in gaming, but it’s not often she gets to be the star. To me, the title seems more like graffiti, just a nicer way of scrawling someplace that reads,“Peach was here”.
Though she’s physically present in the bulk of the Mario games, her Wikipedia page cites very few game entries of her own. There’s Princess Peach: Showtime ahead of its release, Super Princess Peach for the Nintendo DS, and Princess Toadstool’s Castle Run. I’d never heard of the latter before writing this, but apparently, it was a promotional item from McDonald’s in 1990, arriving on a wristwatch that you’d obtain from the restaurant to enjoy a short LCD game. After that, it was more than 15 years before she starred in her own proper game.
As much as I loved getting to hop back into the iconic red heels of my original favorite princess when Super Princess Peach came out, though, I found myself annoyed. At age 13, I was beginning to come out the other side of puberty, and seeing the girl character’s powers tied to emotions felt reductive and, frankly, already kind of tired for me even back in middle school. Now that the boys our age knew what periods were, any grievance any girl might have had was dismissed as a menstrual mishap, while relatives always and immediately assumed that I was giggling at my phone in the earliest days of texting on flip phones because I was talking to a boy.
I liked Super Princess Peach well enough gameplay-wise back then, and I loved needing tosave Mario for a change. But as much as “Vibe Island” sounds more like something from social media in 2024 than a 2006 DS game setting, the notion already felt dated. Peach was in the foreground for once, but I hadn’t thought I’d needed to specify that I wanted her to be more than a victimandmore than her feelings.
And now, almost 20 years later, she finally gets to be in Princess Peach: Showtime! She’s still every bit the same beloved Peach, but this time, she has new powers and an ass-kicking agenda of her own, that seems to be separate from Mario entirely. Maybe it was because The Super Mario Bros. Movie last year finally offered our leading lady a bit more of a leading role, or maybe it’s that it’s 2024 and women the world over are tired of being reduced to our feelings, but either way, Showtime! has already promised that it’s done away with thedamsel in distresstrope.
One of the newest trailers for the game is called“Play Like a Princess,”and it showcases kids (both girls and boys) in awe of all the cool new abilities that Peach has. They highlight a few of the new transformation superpowers as the kids list unique perks that form of Peach has before one of the girls smiles and says, “You know, princess stuff.”
My girl Peachy is going to be a ton of things in Princess Peach: Showtime! when it launches next month. She’ll be more traditionally feminine things like a baker or a mermaid, sure, but she’ll also get to be way more badass than ever before as a detective, a swordswoman, a kung fu master, a ninja, and so much more. What she won’t be is waiting on Mario to come save the day when the bad guy comes knockingyet again. Kids who pick up Princess Peach: Showtime! when it launches in a few weeks are going to be encountering a completely different Princess Peach than the one I played when I was their age. I can’t wait for them to meet her.
