2, which was never meant to be a Mario game at all, made her into one of four playable characters with the advantageous ability to float long distances. She’s always there at the end, waiting for Mario to arrive so she can reward him with a kiss.Ī few Mario games have given her some power. While she’s become a playable character in many spin-off games, she’s rarely ever a central character or given any meaningful story or gameplay moments to herself. for Wii U.Įver since Jumpman first rescued Pauline in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, Princess Peach (or Princess Toadstool, as she was sometimes called) has been a damsel in distress. Then, despite her best efforts, she gets kidnapped by Bowser.Ī familiar scene playing out in Super Smash Bros. She tries hard to motivate her troop of Toads, who are dehydrated and exhausted from the heat. While Mario is turned to stone and Luigi is wailing in panic, she “refuses to be bullied,” takes charge, and sets off down a pipe after Bowser.Īfter that, the storyline splits in two, with Mario and Luigi coming across a Yoshi village and Peach stomping across a scorching desert.
When Bowser stirs up trouble at her castle and threatens to turn all of her people in the Mushroom Kingdom to stone if she doesn’t marry him, she calls him a “Koopa creep” and a “buckethead” and jumps off the balcony in pursuit as he makes his escape. That wasn’t the only progressive quality about this particular Peach. So to see Peach, the helpless princess, enjoying a video game and kicking butt at it was a Big Deal. In the ’90s more than today, girls weren’t the prime demographic for video games, and they certainly weren’t catered to as players. for NES, the same set of games I was playing back then. In the first issue, she’s shown sitting around with a couple Toads who are supervising her royal “play time”-not cake-baking or sewing patches onto overalls but playing Super Mario Bros. Peach in Super Mario Adventures was quite the bombshell. Nobody ever told this girl she couldn’t play games. Friendly Floyd remains one of my favorite Mario side characters, and at the time I drew, illustrated, and cut out paper versions of all the characters and items and stuffed them into a small suitcase to match the traveling salesman’s luggage. I was in love with a comic that ran in its issues throughout 1992 called Super Mario Adventures. My first step into games was through a scattering of NES cartridges and old copies of Nintendo Power magazine, which my two older sisters subscribed to in their teens. In a way, she’s been more powerful in the last year than she has been in decades, yet she’s not quite as formidable as when I first met her.īelow is a look at Peach throughout Mario history-the games that did her justice, the ones that let her down, and why through it all, I still love her. And today she’ll return as a contender in the new Super Smash Bros.
Six months later, in May, she hopped on bikes and in karts in Mario Kart 8-as an adult, a baby, and a solid gold princess. In November, Peach donned a catsuit alongside Mario, Luigi, and Toad and ran around colorful stages in Super Mario 3D World. With Peach’s recent appearances in Nintendo games, I’m reminded of this period in my childhood. The other was-and just bear with me-Princess Peach, who meant more to me at the time than Lara or any other video game heroine has since. I’d pretend to wield dual pistols and hunt for dinosaurs that were no doubt hiding in the woods of Pennsylvania.
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One was Lara Croft, the heroine of Tomb Raider, the action-adventure game series that, yes, oversexualized its female lead while also making her bad-ass enough to inspire me (and countless other girls) to run around my backyard in a ponytail and shorts as close to hers as I could find. When I was in elementary school, playing games on the Nintendo Entertainment System and dreaming about getting a Game Boy Color for Christmas, two video game characters in particular helped me visualize a space for girls like me in the medium I would grow to love and write about.
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