Mario Galaxy Movie Backstory Now Video Game Canon, Miyamoto Suggests

Princess Peach’s surprising backstory revealed in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie will kept in future games, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto has suggested.

Speaking in advance of the film’s belated launch in Japan, Miyamoto was asked whether the movie’s revelations about Princess Peach would be carried forward to future video games featuring the character. In response, Miyamoto suggested that, yes, he wanted to “adhere as much as possible” to Peach’s newly-revealed backstory, now it had been finally been decided upon for inclusion in the movie.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie reveals Peach is the sister of galactic traveller Rosalina, and that both siblings were born from stardust. At a young age, the two sisters were separated when Peach was sent to live in the Mushroom Kingdom for her own safety. Here, the Toads took her in, and eventually made her their queen.

Peach’s cosmic origins — and her relationship to Rosalina, in particular — had been debated by fans for years, long before a tease in the first Super Mario Movie suggested we’d likely find out more about the character’s movie version than Nintendo had ever revealed in 40 years of video games.

Indeed, Miyamoto has now discussed his previous reluctance to define strict backstories for Nintendo’s characters, something he told Japanese website Nintendo Dream Web he had been concerned would become a “constraint.”

“Because we don’t know what kind of game we’ll make next, having too many character settings can become a constraint,” Miyamoto explained (via machine translation). “I’m fine with being bound by gameplay mechanics, 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.

“That’s why, until we made this movie, we hadn’t decided on the characters’ origins, but now that we’ve made the movie, it’s become fun to expand on the characters in various ways. Therefore, we want to adhere as much as possible to the settings created in the movie in future games.”

All of which sounds like Peach and Rosalina are now canonically sisters both on the big screen and in video games — even if few Nintendo games spend time on story anyway.

Earlier this month, Miyamoto said he had long held a “vague idea” for Peach and Rosalina’s true relationship, something still kept vague in the original Super Mario Galaxy game. Famously, Galaxy’s story was developed by veteran Mario director Yoshiaki Koizumi — who wrote the game’s plot in secret after hours, while Miyamoto and other developers weren’t around.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social