One of the long-standing mysteries of the video game Super Mario 64 may finally be solved. For almost thirty years, players have tried to make out the inscription on a plaque beside a statue in Princess Peach's castle, but because of the low resolution they saw only indistinct pixels. A programmer known by the alias Mochi64 carried out an exhaustive computer analysis to establish what it actually says.
Since the game's release in 1996, a theory has circulated among fans that the plaque reads "L is real 2401". Many believed it was a hint at Luigi, Mario's brother, who can be unlocked somehow in the game, and that the number 2401 was the key to unlocking him. The legend became especially popular after Nintendo Power jokingly mentioned it in 1998. The mystery remained unsolved from then on.
Mochi64 approached the problem mathematically. He built a tool that ran through millions of combinations of words, fonts and image-processing techniques that an artist might have used in the mid-1990s. The goal was to find a phrase that, once compressed to low resolution, would produce an image most similar to the one in the game. He published his results and the code of the program openly so that others could check them.
After analysing more than 1.2 million variants, the program identified the phrase with the smallest deviation from the original. According to the calculations, the plaque reads "Eternal Star" ("Вечная звезда") and, on the line below, "We hope so" ("Мы на это надеемся"). This version produced a considerably closer match than the old "L is real 2401" theory, which the computer analysis effectively refuted.
Although the programmer's conclusions look convincing, Nintendo, the creator of the game, has so far made no comment on them. Until official confirmation arrives, the mystery formally remains open, but it now has a plausible and mathematically grounded solution.
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