While most people today know Mario's pink-dress-wearing, royal love interest under the name Princess Peach, this wasn't always the case.
Prior to the release of Super Mario 64, for instance, most people in the West referred to the princess by another name instead, Princess Toadstool, with only the occasional piece of Mario media (such as Yoshi's Safari) referring to her by her original Japanese name.
This supposedly all came about thanks to the way in which Nintendo of America initially handled the localization for its game manuals in the '80s, with the North American outpost hiring an ad agency that ended up just making up own original names for characters, as opposed to referring to the original Japanese.
Rather than correct it, Nintendo of America ended up using it for many of the subsequent games, as well as the The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! — something that reportedly confused Mario's creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who wondered whether the name "Peach" was somehow unpopular with Western audiences.
During an exclusive interview with Time Extension, Leslie Swan, the voice of Princess Peach in Super Mario 64 and the person responsible for localizing the game into English, spoke about Miyamoto's disappointment at the name being replaced, and her simple solution to help ease Western audiences into finally referring to the character by their proper name.
"One thing that I thought was really funny was, in the early days, there wasn't a lot of communication between the dev teams and what we were doing from a marketing standpoint in the United States," said Leslie Swan. "So on Super Mario Bros. they had outsourced the production of the manual to an ad agency. And the ad agency just kind of created names for things. And so they're the ones who came up with Princess Toadstool as the name for Peach.
"So when I went over and I was working on the localization [for Super Mario 64], I would sit with Mr. Miyamoto and a translator and they would be going over the changes I had made and I would explain why I was making the changes, and one day, Mr. Miyamoto just said, 'Is Peach a bad name?' And I had to tell him, 'No, but you know she is called Princess Toadstool in the US'. I remember he said, 'Well, I really like Peach as her name'. So I came up with the idea to say, 'Why don't we call her Princess Peach Toadstool?' Then we could refer to her informally as Peach."
According to Swan, this explains the letter at the start of the game, which is initially signed Princess Toadstool, but also features the name "Peach" scrawled over the top in a different font.
"At the very beginning of the game, there's that message from Princess Peach to Mario saying 'Dear Mario, Please come to the castle. I baked a cake for you.' She initially signs it formally as Princess Toadstool, but then she handwrites Peach over the top of it to be less formal."
Following Super Mario 64, Nintendo of America would then continue to refer to the character as Peach, with Toadstool occasionally be used as the surname for the character.