“Last week, I was one of the guests featured on a Patreon-only episode of the Retronauts podcast about the history of Bowser. I bring this up to encourage you all to support Retronauts because they do cool stuff with old video games, but also I’m going to share one of the things we talk about in this episode — as an incentive to chip in, I guess, but it’s also very much the kind of thing I write about on this blog.
Now, here’s a question I’m not sure I thought about before doing this episode: If Nintendo went through the trouble of renaming the princess formerly known as Toadstool so that she went by her original Japanese name internationally, why didn’t they do the same for Bowser? In Japan, he’s always been Koopa, but ever since Super Mario Bros. was localized for English-speaking territories, he’s been Bowser. From a brand standpoint, you’d think Nintendo would want to simplify everything in the way they’d done with Peach.
This is actually pretty complicated, it turns out!“
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