Waluigi, you know him, you love him, you might be in love with him, who knows? The gangly menace was first designed by Fumihide Aoki for 1999’s Mario Tennis on the N64, to act as the Luigi to Wario’s Mario, as it were. In the years since, fans across the globe have been wondering if there were more “Wa” counterparts to the Mario characters we know and love, and today it seems we’ve gotten our first look at the long-rumored “Walpeach.”
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Sketches of Walpeach were first shared early this morning on Instagram by an account by the name of yuzumpo, which has zero information available about who the account actually belongs to. The account itself has plenty of concept art from Golden Sun and the Shining Force series, including a previously unseen summon animation from Golden Sun, which the account claims would have been called Artemis. This concept art all points to the account belonging to the father of Waluigi, Fumihide Aoki himself, who also worked as a graphic designer on both the Golden Sun and Shining Force series.
With a little digging, it seems that the account does, in fact, belong to Fumihide Aoki, confirmed by a screenshot of an Instagram story shared by the private account of Masanori Sato, a former Nintendo promotional artist who worked alongside Aoki on Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Aoki also shared images of a 3D model for Walpeach, who Aoki designed for Mario Power Tennis on the GameCube, rather than for the N64’s Mario Tennis, according to comments he made on the original sketches.
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Other comments made by Aoki include just a bit more information, including the fact that she would indeed have been named Walpeach and that he doesn’t know exactly why the design was scrapped.
Today’s Walpeach reveal is much in the same vein as Super Mario RPG’s scrapped Three Musketeers motif we covered yesterday, offering a fascinating look at long-rumored Nintendo information that can just be posted out of the blue, even after all this time.
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Written by Jaxson Tapp
As a lover of gaming and the written word, Jaxson currently fills his time not only with playing games, but also writing about them. Ready for anything, Jaxson’s passion for puzzle games, JRPGs, tough platformers, and whimsical indies helps him bring a well-rounded opinion to Nintendo Wire’s reporting.
