Mario 64 plaque mystery gets a computational answer
The blurry plaque by the fountain in Super Mario 64 most likely reads “Eternal Star” on the top line and “We Hope So” on the bottom.
That is the result from programmer Mochi64, who built an open-source tool to test the decades-old mystery with millions of calculations, as reported by Video Games Chronicle.
The plaque sits in the courtyard of Peach’s Castle. Players have stared at it for years. Many became convinced it said “L is Real 2401”, a supposed hint that Luigi, Mario’s brother, was hidden somewhere in the game.
It was always hard to check by eye. The original text was stored on a tile 32 by 32 pixels in size, a tiny square of image data used to surface detail. The two lines of writing on it stand only 3 to 5 pixels tall. At that size, each letter is just a few dots.
Mochi64 tried to work backwards. The tool rebuilt what that text might have been, then shrank it using typefaces and resizing methods from the mid-1990s. Each rebuild was compared pixel by pixel against the texture kept in the game. Millions of combinations were scored for closeness.
“Eternal Star / We Hope So” came out on top. It received a mismatch score of 1,129, with a lower number meaning a closer match. The long-time favourite did far worse. “L is Real 2401” scored 2,031 on the first line alone.
The search was broad. The tool tested more than 1.2 million words and scored each one for fit. No other pairing found so far has beaten the winning lines.
Mochi64 has published the results and code for anyone to inspect. There is also a “plaque challenge” inviting other fans to run the open-source code and try to find an alternative phrase with a lower score.
The Luigi hunt has a long history. In 1996, IGN offered US$100 to anyone who could work out how to unlock Luigi in Super Mario 64. Nintendo Power later mentioned the “L is Real 2401” idea in an April Fool’s Day feature in its April 1998 issue. Fans convinced Luigi was hidden treated the plaque as the clue they needed, according to IGN, which revisited the saga in a retrospective titled ‘The Mario 64 Bounty That Took 30 Years to Settle’.
For fans, this means the old reading is probably gone for good. The new lines are not a secret code. They sound like a small sign-off from the team that built the castle grounds.
