Former Nintendo localization manager reveals origins of Princess Peach’s Toadstool name

Leslie Swan, a former localization manager at Nintendo of America who spent nearly three decades at the company, has spoken about how Princess Peach’s “Toadstool” name came to be.

In the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros., the character was simply known as Princess Peach. However, for the U.S. version, it changed to Princess Toadstool. It turns out that this happened due to the ad agency coming up with the name on its own.

Eventually, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto was brought in on things. He personally was a fan of Peach, which is how she would be referred to informally in the west. Princess Peach Toadstool is more of a formal name. This is when we started to see Princess Peach Toadstool in Super Mario 64.

Swan told Time Extension in a new interview:

“Well, 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.

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, 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.”

For the opening of Super Mario 64, the letter Mario reads is signed by Princess Toadstool. However, over that she writes just Peach, which was his way of being less formal.