One of the creators of Waluigi, Fumihide Aoki, has revealed concept art of what the bad version of Princess Peach they were considering introducing for the Mario Tennis games would look like. This character has been referred to as either Wapeach or Warupeachi. If you didn’t know, Waluigi and Wario essentially stand for “bad Luigi” and “bad Mario” in Japanese, so this character would play a similar role, but on the female side.
See the concept art here.
Similar to how Waluigi was made in the N64 Mario Tennis game to be a doubles partner for Wario, Camelot considered a similar approach to Peach until Shigeru Miyamoto turned them down, saying, “I don’t even want to know what Wario and Waluigi’s girlfriend looks like.” While those talks are known to have happened for the N64 game, they only had a name at that point. These concept art pieces are apparently from Mario Power Tennis for the GameCube, so they must have explored this option again and went even further.
It would be very interesting to see this character visited again. Just from a visual standpoint, Warupeachi doesn’t appear as grotesque as Wario or as creepy as Waluigi. We love her dark purple color scheme, though. We wonder if she would have been an actual princess or if that thin crown is a fake and she would have just acted like she was royalty. The actual princesses in Mario’s world aren’t very controlling, so we wonder if that’s the angle they would have gone with her. The art of her holding an axe instead of a tennis racket probably was an idea for her power move swing.
It is pretty amazing to see concept art for a character in the works decades ago. Before this, there were conversations that Camelot was talking about the character, but this is the first we have actually ever seen of Warupeachi. More reveals like this from old games are always appreciated.
