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The princess who Mario regularly rescues from evil dragon-turtle kidnappings is named Peach, right? The earliest generation of English-speaking Nintendo fans might have had a different answer to that question, since they came up calling her Princess Toadstool. The exact reason why has been a mystery for decades, but a new interview has finally revealed that an ad agency is to blame.
Princess Peach was always known as Peach in Japan, but in the US the original Super Mario Bros. manual called her Princess Toadstool. The Toadstool name stuck around for a decade, until Super Mario 64 set the standard that she'd be known for through to today.
"On Super Mario Bros. they had outsourced the production of the manual to an ad agency," veteran Nintendo of America localization manager Leslie Swan tells Time Extension. "And the ad agency just kind of created names for things. And so they're the ones who came up with Princess Toadstool as the name for Peach."
Swan was an editor for Nintendo Power, and among her jobs was writing the translated versions of the comics that would appear in the magazine. When she worked on the official Super Mario 64 guide, she suggested that the devs should get "a professional writing team" on the localization, since it was such a "special game." A few days later, she was asked if she had a passport, because she was unexpectedly about to become the head of that team.
"I would sit with Mr. Miyamoto and a translator and they would be going over the changes I had made and I would explain why I was making the changes," Swan explains, "and one day, Mr. Miyamoto just said, 'Is Peach a bad name?' And I had to tell him, 'No, but you know she is called Princess Toadstool in the US.' I remember he said, 'Well, I really like Peach as her name.' So I came up with the idea to say, 'Why don't we call her Princess Peach Toadstool?' Then we could refer to her informally as Peach."
That's how the letter that opens Super Mario 64 came to be. The Mushroom Kingdom royal signs her name as "Princess Toadstool," with a big informal addition of "Peach" at the end as a sort of nickname. Finally, we had a single answer to the mystery of the princess's name that made both versions a sort of canon. Well, aside from the part where Toadstool was quickly dropped from almost every future appearance of Peach's name.
Swan had another big part in the Super Mario 64 intro, since she voiced Peach in the sequence – though that part's never been a mystery. The job of voicing the princess, Swan says, happened simply because "I was the only English-speaking person in the development area within EAD." I guess a whole lot of happenstance and a fair bit of luck is involved in creating an iconic video game character.
It's tough to top Super Mario 64, but just because the show started with a showstopper doesn't mean there aren't some real gems among the best N64 games.
