The year is 1985, and you’ve just beaten
Super Mario Bros. At the end of your journey, you finally meet
Princess Peach. Dark red hair, one black beady eye, and a
white and red dress. This is the Princess you’ve just saved. But, hang on a second. Compare THAT Peach with the Peach on the front
of the Japanese box, and these look like two completely different women! A few years later in Mario 64, and again,
her design is just completely unique! Princess Peach has gone through so many redesigns
over the years, and today I want to figure out why. So let us answer the question: Why doesn’t
Princess Peach look like she used to? It all starts with the original Super Mario
Bros. The game was created as a close collaboration
between two designers at Nintendo: Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. To get an idea of what the pair are like,
Miyamoto once said this: “I'll think up a unique idea, and he'll think up a crazy
idea that can't possibly be turned into a video game. And together we'll massage those ideas into
one that can finally be realized as a game.” So, Super Mario Bros began as just a box moving
across a screen. The box couldn’t jump, it couldn’t really
go anywhere, you could just move it up, down, left and right. But obviously, this box would need to become
something. It needed to be turned into an actual character. One day, Takashi Tezuka was chatting with
the head of Nintendo’s sales and marketing division, when he asked to see the sales data
for all of Nintendo’s games. Keep in mind Tezuka was a new employee at
the time, so this request was quite presumptuous. Regardless, the head of sales did show him
the data he asked for, and Tezuka noticed something interesting. More than a year after its release, the NES
version of the Mario Bros arcade game was still selling really well! He thought to himself, "This Mario is pretty
popular,” and suggested to Miyamoto that they make the main character of their moving
box game into Mario. Before long, Super Mario Bros had really started
taking shape, with a blue sky for a background, and intricate platforming challenges for levels. However, Miyamoto and Tezuka needed some kind
of reason for players to reach the end of the game. And together, the pair of designers decided
to adopt a classic “damsel in distress” storyline. You see these stories in all kinds of classic
fairy tales - a beautiful maiden is kidnapped, and a handsome knight must rescue her! Now, for this beautiful maiden, Miyamoto and
Tezuka could have re-used Pauline from the Donkey Kong arcade game. In fact, it would have made a lot of sense,
considering Donkey Kong is also the game where Mario originated. But, they didn’t do that. Instead, Tezuka and Miyamoto decided to design
a brand new “damsel in distress”. And this is where Princess Peach first came
into the world. Let me tell you a fun fact about Super Mario
Bros: there wasn’t a single artist working on the game. Instead, that job fell to Shigeru Miyamoto
and Takashi Tezuka. That’s right, as well as designing the game’s
systems, levels and mechanics, the pair also drew all of the art. For Princess Peach, the design was pretty
limited by the NES’s colour palette restrictions. For each 16 by 16 tile, only 4 colours could
be used. Since the transparent background also counts
as a colour, that left only 3 actual colours to work with. And so, Miyamoto and Tezuka had to use some
clever tricks when designing the princess’s sprite. Like, her red hair can double as the red of
her lips, and part of the dress too. Or, the colour of her skin, which is also
used for the golden crown on her head. The entire design was created in order to
skirt around some pretty tight restrictions. It’s very clever! So, with work on Super Mario Bros finishing
up, this is the look of the princess that players would travel so far in order to rescue. However, before the game could be released,
Shigeru Miyamoto had a pretty major task to complete: “When we came out with Super Mario
Bros., I was thinking about asking a professional manga artist or a well-known illustrator to
do the art, but time was running out, so I drew the original art for the package myself.” That’s right! For the illustration on the front of the Japanese
packaging, it was Shigeru Miyamoto himself who drew the artworrk. And he ended up using this opportunity to
flesh out Peach’s design a lot more. Her red and white dress was replaced with
a pink coloured one, with some kind of white ruffle around the neck. Her hair was lightened from a dark red, to
a light brown colour. She was given big blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. THIS was the princess as Shigeru Miyamoto
intended. And when Super Mario Bros was released in
Japan in 1985, this is how she looked on the front of the box. Until that is, her design was completely scrapped. So, this is the part of the story where I
need to introduce you to Yoichi Kotabe. I’ve talked about him a few times in the
past, but he’s a legendary animator from Japan who’s worked with some of the top
talent from Studio Ghibli, just as one example of what he’s done. But in 1985, Kotabe was looking for his next
gig, when he was contacted by Nintendo. This came as a bit of a surprise to him: the
only video game Kotabe had even heard of before was Space Invaders - what use would the world
of games have for an animator like him? But, after getting up to speed with some newer
games, he quickly came to the realisation that the world of video games was doing some
really interesting and exciting things when it came to animation! So, Kotabe accepted the job offer. And before long, he began working for Nintendo. But once he actually joined the company, no-one
was really sure what to do with Kotabe, this master animator. For his first project, he designed a beautiful,
smooth animation of Luigi spinning around in circles. But it couldn’t be used in any of the games,
because it had so many frames of animation, far more than could fit on the limited memory
of an NES cartridge. Kotabe later reflected, “At that time I
was drawing a lot of stuff that no one could use.” Next, Miyamoto asked Kotabe to draw a smooth
animation of a magic flying carpet. And, this animation DID end up being used
in a game, but almost all of the frames of animation had to be cut, again, just to fit
it on the game’s cartridge. So, there was definitely a learning curve
for Kotabe when he joined Nintendo. But around this time, he was given his biggest
task yet: to redesign the main characters from Super Mario Bros. Now, even in 1985, Mario was huge. He’d starred in Donkey Kong, in the Mario
Bros arcade game, and then finally, in Super Mario Bros. And, even days after its launch, it was clear
that Super Mario Bros was going to be HUGE. And now, it was up to Yoichi Kotabe to redesign
the characters from the game. Finally, this is where Princess Peach got
her biggest redesign yet. So, first thing’s first, Yoichi Kotabe had
a look at the in-game art - the pixelated sprites. Okay, well there was just a single sprite
for the princess, which wasn’t a lot to go on. So, next he looked for official artwork. But again, there was only a single illustration
on the front of the box. So, Kotabe asked who drew this illustration,
and found it was Shigeru Miyamoto! He approached Miyamoto, and asked what he
wanted from this new design for Princess Peach. Well, Shigeru Miyamoto actually had some big
changes he wanted for Princess Peach. He later explained, “Peach completely changed. I told him everything I wanted, like how I
wanted the eyes to be a little cat-like.” And also how he wanted her to look “Stubborn,
but charming.” That’s how Princess Peach’s face began
to resemble how she looks nowadays. As for her clothing, Kotabe decided to stick
with a pink dress, as seen in Miyamoto’s artwork. But he removed the white ruffle thing round
her neck, and added a big gemstone on her chest. She was given two blue earrings, and then,
lastly for the hair, Kotabe went with a much blonder, almost golden colour. And voila! This was the redesigned look of Princess Peach. And if you’ve been playing Mario games for
a while, it should look rather familiar. So, that’s the end of the story, right? Well, not quite. Although Yoichi Kotabe continued producing
promotional art of Peach, inside the games themselves it was a different story. In Mario 2 and 3, for instance, Peach still
had that dark red hair from her original 8 bit sprite, and the hairstyle also bore little
resemblance to the one Yoichi Kotabe gave her. You can see some attempts to include elements
of the Kotabe design, like the pink colour of the dress and some earrings. But on the whole, these sprites don’t look
a whole lot like the design that Yoichi Kotabe created. Likely this was due to technical restrictions
more than anything else. But finally, a few years later with the release
of Super Mario World, Peach’s in-game design got a big update. Finally, her blonde hair made it into the
games, along with the distinctive hairstyle that Kotabe gave her. And while her earrings still aren’t QUITE
the right colour, most other details made it over, like that gem on the front of the
dress. This is undoubtedly an adaptation of Yoichi
Kotabe’s redesigned Princess Peach. Then, in 1996 came one final, HUGE change. 3D! For the first time, Peach was no longer a
flat collection of pixels, but instead an object in 3D space! And, the guy in charge of Mario 64’s 3D
models was Yoshiaki Koizumi. In fact, one of Koizumi’s first tasks on
Mario 64 was to design the 3D model for Mario, which is kinda a lot of responsibility! After all, players would be staring at this
guy for the entire game! But, after that, Koizumi later designed the
first 3D model for Peach, too! And he closely based this model on Yoichi
Kotabe’s design. Her blonde hair and distinctive hairstyle,
the blue earrings, the gem on her chest, everything from Kotabe’s design was brought over. And so, together with Leslie Swan’s voiceover
work, THIS is what players saw when they started a new game. "Dear Mario: Please come to the castle. I've baked a cake for you. Yours truly-- Princess Toadstool. Peach!" Of course, Peach’s design has changed a
little from that initial chunky looking 3D model. But, only very slightly! Put the 3D model from 1996 next to a render
from the last few years, and other than looking a little smoother, there aren’t really any
major changes. This is the Princess Peach that players know
and love. A far cry from that initial, beady eyed sprite,
or Shigeru Miyamoto’s slightly goofy looking illustration. She’s certainly come a long way in 35 years. Hey, thanks for watching to the end! I hope you enjoyed this video! And if you did, you might enjoy my video about
why Pikachu doesn't look like he used to - that's on screen if you're interested. And thank you, again, for watching! Okay! Goodbye! Bye!
