YouTuber solves 30-year-old Super Mario 64 plaque mystery

YouTuber mochi64 claims to have solved one of Super Mario 64's biggest mysteries nearly 30 years after the game's 1996 release. The creator determined that a blurry plaque beneath a star statue in Peach's Castle courtyard reads "Eternal Star. We hope so" rather than the long-theorized "L is real 2401".

The plaque's texture measures just 32x32 pixels, making the letters almost impossible to decipher. Mochi64 developed a program to recreate how a Nintendo artist would have produced the texture in 1996, testing approximately 530 fonts alongside millions of combinations of words, letter spacing, image sizes, and resizing techniques.

After narrowing down the font to Adobe's 1990 version of Palatino Bold Italic, the program tested more than 27,000 words for the first line and over 17,000 English words for the second line. The "L is real 2401" theory performed roughly twice as poorly when compared against the original texture.

The discovery could end decades of speculation that the plaque contained instructions for unlocking Luigi. Shigeru Miyamoto previously confirmed that Luigi was originally included in Super Mario 64 as part of a planned multiplayer mode but was removed due to memory limitations. Mochi64 released the project's code, data, and a 40-page report on GitHub for others to test the findings.