While The Super Mario Galaxy Movie left some fans and critics unsatisfied, it’s a box-office hit by every measure. The animated film from Universal and Illumination has topped the U.S. box office for three weeks straight, earning nearly $750 million in ticket sales worldwide. On the heels of the movie’s success, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto said he hopes to see future games adhere to Princess Peach’s expanded backstory from the film.
[Ed. note: This article contains minor spoilers for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.]
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie reveals that Peach and Rosalina are actually sisters who were separated when they were very young. In an interview with Japanese outlet Nintendo Dream (translated by Nintendo Everything), Miyamoto said that while he is generally reluctant to lock his iconic characters into a specific story, he hopes that future games featuring Princess Peach will preserve and build upon this detail.
Miyamoto explained that there’s a reason we know so little about the characters in the Mario universe, even though they’ve been around for more than four decades. “Because we don’t know what kind of game we’ll make next with our characters, having too many character settings would become a constraint,” Miyamoto said. “I’m fine with being bound by the gameplay, but I don’t want to be bound by having created a story, which has been the reason for not making movies for many years.” While he didn’t explicitly connect the idea of being bound by an ongoing story to The Legend of Zelda, it’s pretty clear the same logic applies to that franchise, too.
What’s more, the Peach and Rosalina connection wasn’t a secret bit of lore Miyamoto and other Nintendo staffers had been sitting on for years. That link was concocted specifically for the film. “Before making this movie, I hadn’t decided on the character’s backstory,” he explained. “But now that I’m making the movie, it’s become fun to expand on the character in various ways. Therefore, I would like to adhere as much as possible to the settings created in the movie in future games.”
While we probably shouldn’t expect any deep psychological exploration of the impact of being separated from a sibling in future Nintendo games, a co-op Peach and Rosalina adventure would be pretty darn fun.
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