After 27 years, the director of a Nintendo 64 cult classic returned to lead Princess Peach Showtime

Now Princess Peach: Showtime is out, it's time to talk about the feel-good comeback of an old-school director we've got thanks to the studio behind it.

Princess Peach: Showtime was developed by Good-Feel, the same Japanese third-party responsible for Kirby's Epic Yarn, Yoshi's Woolly World, and Yoshi's Crafted World. This doesn't come as much of a surprise, given that dataminers had uncovered evidence of that fact from the game's demo. Showtime certainly shares the breezy, approachable gameplay of Good-Feel's earlier titles.

The real surprise is that Showtime was directed by Etsunobu Ebisu. A former Konami employee, Ebisu founded Good-Feel back in 2005 but has only been credited as a producer in the studio's games until now. In fact, his last directorial role was Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, a cult classic Nintendo 64 platformer released in 1997.

Ahead of Showtime's launch, I wrote about how strange it is that Nintendo keeps refusing to say who makes its games, going as far as telling interested journalists to just wait and see the credits. It's still strange! Games are the products of hardworking people, not some magical software factory, and given how often Nintendo itself trots out legendary developers like Shigeru Miyamoto or Eiji Aonuma to serve as the faces for its games it remains bewildering to me that the company is growing increasingly steadfast in its efforts to obfuscate the third-party partners it's been working with for years.

I can only hope that we'll be allowed to know who's working on the next back of upcoming Switch games.