In case you haven’t seen it,Nintendohas recently updated the box art for one of its upcoming first-party games, Princess Peach: Showtime! A side-by-side comparison of the old box art with the new one (shown below) plays out a lot like one of those spot-the-differences images from old Highlights magazines, so let’s make it easy: in both the center image and the one off to the right, the new version makes Peach look like she’s ready to kick ass and take names.
Going to be totally honest here: this game was not on my radar. At all. It’s still kind of not, because I don’t have any intentions of buying or playing it. That’s not a knock on Peach herself, but I just don’t really get excited forMariogames as much as I did when I was still wearing footie pajamas past noon and only putting down the controller to eat sugary cereal for my first two meals of the day. (For reference, I’m talking about the ’80s and not 2020, although both would be pretty accurate).
What I am excited for is seeing a classically helpless damsel-in-distress type taking the lead and looking fierce while doing it.
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Folks, I’m an old fart. My first console didn’t just need to be on channel 3; it also had faux wood paneling. And while Gamergate still seems like it was just a couple years ago instead of almost a decade, we’re still hearing plenty of stories of girls and women in the gaming world who just can’t get equal respect, from the players to the developers. The stigma is a lot more relaxed than it used to be, but that doesn’t mean everything’s sunshine and rainbows now.
I’m not going to talk at length about this particular topic, because I grew up being given Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joes while I had to borrow my sisters' Barbie and Jem dolls to put on rock shows and host killer swim parties. In other words, I didn’t grow up with all the societal expectations that girls face, and while gender equality is important to me, I’ve always had to look at it from an outsider’s view, so there are plenty of much-more-credible sources to go to for those stories.
What I can tell you, from observation across the decades, is that female representation in the golden days of gaming sucked. My go-to fighting game wasStreet Fighter2 Turbo, and we had 12 characters to pick from. If you wanted to play as a female, you had Chun-Li and that’s it. A couple of my friends and I even headcanoned (before that was a word) that Vega could be a woman because of the high-pitched battle cry and the feminine facial features he was given behind the mask, just to have more variety. In retrospect, it was a little sexist to box off the only two genders we knew about on such strict lines like that, but we were well-intentioned kids who were still trying to figure out the world without a lot of guidance on gender sensitivity.
A far as Nintendo goes, yeah, we were given Samus fromMetroid, but she spends the entire game inside heavy mechanical armor, so at the time, no one really knew she was a woman unless they beat the game under a specific time limit…which let you see her in an 8-bit bikini. Not exactly Custer’s Revenge stuff, but not exactly empowering either.
Really, Peach is where it’s at for OG badass women in gaming. Even before the rebranding, when she was still known as Princess Toadstool, Nintendo decided that the realSuper Mario Bros. 2would be too hard for western audiences and gave us a reskinned Doki Doki Panic instead.
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This time around, we got our choice of four playable characters at the start of every single stage, each with their own playstyle. And apart from a select few sandy stages where Toad’s ability to dig quickly came in handy, we all chose Peach—every last one of us. Luigi may have jumped higher, but Peach was second in that category, and she could bypass enemies and platforming sections by just floating right over them. Everybody’s combat capabilities were pretty much the same, so she didn’t actually have an edge in fighting enemies, but she hung in there with the boys by being equally as effective and showing them up by making sure that getting to those boss battles was a total breeze.
I have to assume Peach’s Role inThe Super Mario Bros. Moviehad something to do with this change. I’m not the only one who looked at the box art and immediately saw the Universal Pictures version of Peach staring back at them, just begging us to try something. In the movie,Peach isn’t some delicate flower; she’s the proud and strong ruler of a nation full of, sorry to say it, inept subjects, but she rallies them to put a stop to Bowser’s intimidatingly advancing horde. It’s really only been a few months, but it seems like just yesterday that I was scrolling through comment sections seeing people (to be fair, just men) whining that our princess was actually ruling over the castle rather than just waiting for Mario to come rescue her. And she was doing it while weaing pants!? Blasphemous.
True, the cover art for Showtime doesn’t feature the white and pink racing gear, but it does show Peach decked out in musketeer garb holding a fencing sword and performing a flying side kick while clad in a kung fu movie star outfit, and if she wants to wear her floofy pink dress while she lays beatdowns on the Sour Bunch, I’ll gladly accept that too. It’s not like she hasn’t been doing it since 1988.
