Designs For Scrapped Mario Character “Wapeach” Surface Online

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One of Mario’s greatest foes is his evil alter ego, Wario. He was first introduced in 1992 in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins for the Nintendo GameBoy. Eight years later, on the Nintendo 64, the multiplayer game Mario Tennis introduced Waluigi, an evil counterpart to Luigi, to go with the 2v2 gameplay. However, Waluigi wasn’t going to be the only new character introduced, as a character called “Wapeach” was pitched, but Shigeru Miyamoto shot it down and suggested Princess Daisy from the first Super Mario Land be used instead.



Now, many years later, thanks to Waluigi’s original designer, Fumihide Aoki, we know what she would have looked like. On his Instagram account, he shared multiple images of concept art and even a 3D Model of the scrapped character. She was apparently being pitched to be playable in the 2004 sequel Mario Power Tennis but was once again rejected.



The pictures were originally shared on Aoki’s Instagram page. He spoke about her development and even gave some backstory about how he thinks she is the princess of a fallen kingdom. However, all traces have since been deleted, probably due to legal pressure from Nintendo, as they are known to dislike internal information leaking out. But that hasn’t stopped people from sharing the image online. 



One of the primary reasons why Wapeach was rejected was due to the risk of her design being seen as too similar to the villainess Doronjo from the Tatsukono anime series Yatterman. She serves as the leader of the Doronbo Gang, a team of three villains who antagonize the protagonists.



This villainous trio also has numerous variants across various other Tatsunoko anime, albeit under different names to keep the theme. 



If you were to put the three “Wa” characters together, Wario, Waluigi and Wapeach, you would most definitely notice similarities. Nintendo most likely wanted to avoid it being labeled as either a parody or a knock-off.

Despite Aoki deleting the pictures, Wapeach has now become popular with the fandom, similar to the infamous “Bowsette” meme from 2018. Numerous artists have since created fan art of her, and many are pushing for Nintendo to make her canon.

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https://twitter.com/Eggritos/status/1731522896240037960

While for now, she isn’t officially part of the Mario series, you never know if fan outcry may persuade Nintendo to rethink the idea for a future project. Who knows. Maybe in a possible sequel to the 2023 Super Mario Bros. Movie we could see the “Wa-Gang” make some impact.

What do you think? Should Nintendo make Wapeach a reality? Or should she be left on the cutting room floor with other scrapped content like Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds? Let us know.

Source: Polygon, Nintendo Life





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