Remembering the cringe surrounding Super Princess Peach
For the first time in nearly two decades, Princess Peach headlines her own game in the soon-to-be-released Princess Peach: Showtime! for Nintendo Switch. Peach’s previous starring adventure, Super Princess Peach, debuted on Nintendo DS in 2005, and inverted the typical story of a Super Mario Bros. game, tasking the princess with rescuing dudes in distress Mario and Luigi.
Like Super Princess Peach, Showtime! appears to be targeted at a younger audience, based on its forgiving level of difficulty and simple controls. There are other similarities, including Peach having a sentient object as a sidekick. In Showtime!, it’s a magical ribbon; in Super Princess Peach, it’s a boy who was transformed into a magical parasol named Perry.
Thankfully, there have been other changes. The tenor of the conversation around the new game seems to have progressed compared to how Super Princess Peach was written about at the time. And Nintendo’s current explanation of her special abilities in Showtime! is far less cringe-worthy and sexist than the setup for her DS adventure.
Super Princess Peach was originally planned for the Game Boy Advance by developer Tose, a journeyman studio behind dozens of Nintendo, Capcom, and Square Enix games, but it was eventually brought forward to the then-new Nintendo DS. That transition was evident in the simplistic implementation of the DS’ touchscreen. As Peach, players could call upon four emotions, or Vibes as the game described them, that powered her abilities. Those Vibes — joy, rage, gloom, and calm — were accessible by tapping the four corners of a DS touchscreen, and let Peach set objects on fire by tapping into her anger and soaking levels with tears with her overdramatic “bawling.”
In her 2013 Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video “Damsel in Distress: Part 3,” critic Anita Sarkeesian argued that Super Princess Peach’s mood-swing-based powers made the game a “train wreck of gender stereotypes.”
“Peach’s powers are her out-of-control, frantic
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