Wapeach

About

Wapeach also known as Walupeachy is the arch-rival of Princess Peach from the Super Mario series, similar to how Wario is Mario's rival and Waluigi is Luigi's rival. Wapeach was meant to appear in Mario Tennis for the Nintendo 64, but was scrapped during production. In December 2023, Waluigi's creator Fumihide Aoki, akaYuzumpo, shared several official drawings of Wapeach's character design, including a 3D rendering of the character, on Instagram, inspiring reactions and fan art of the character on social media.

Origin

On October 28th, 2000, Waluigi's creator wrote on Camelot.co^[1] that Mario Tennis on the Nintendo 64, which features the first appearance of Waluigi, was meant to have a similar "rival" character for Peach. However, the idea was shut down in production, with Nintendo telling him "they didn't want to see that" and "it didn't look cute."

On December 1st, 2023, Instagram^[2][3] user and Waluigi designer Fumihide Aoki, aka Yuzumpo on Instagram, made two posts sharing, for the first time, official concept art and a 3D render of Wapeach, garnering over 1,000 like and 600 likes respectively in under a day (shown below).

Spread

The Wapeach artwork gained viral spread the day it was announced. On December 1st, 2023, it was reported on by Nintendo Everything^[4] and became the subject of a YouTube^[5] video by GameXplain (shown below). The GameXplain video claims that the 3D render is from Mario Power Tennis on the Gamecube. That day, X^[6] user @misterduby shared the concept art, writing, "WAPEACH HAS BEEN REVEALED Posted by Waluigi’s creator on Instagram," garnering over 16,000 likes in under a day.

That day, social media users began posting fan art of Wapeach both based on the official design and on their own designs. For example, X^[7] user @nescartridges posted a piece of art that gained over 960 likes in around two hours (shown below, left). X^[8] user @RoboticSteve posted artwork that gained over 660 likes in the same rough span of time (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References