mochi64, an overseas YouTuber who specializes in retro games, has released analysis results suggesting that the inscription in Peach’s Castle in *Super Mario 64*—which has long been rumored to read “L is Real 2401”—may actually convey a different message.
Findings Suggest the Text Matches the Statue Holding a Star
The stone statue holding a star in the courtyard of Peach’s Castle. Regarding the mysterious inscription on its pedestal, the blurry text has long been interpreted as “L is Real 2401,” leading to rumors that “Luigi”—who is not supposed to appear in this game, which is intended for Mario only—actually exists, and that the numbers indicate the conditions for his appearance.
On the other hand, there has long been a theory that the inscription reads “Eternal Star.” In this latest analysis, mochi64 suggests the possibility that the top line reads “Eternal Star” and the bottom line reads “We hope so.”Translated, this string of text conveys the meaning “Eternal Star / We hope so.” In his analysis, mochi64 reportedly recreated an image closely resembling the in-game inscription based on the fonts and image processing techniques used at the time.
Since the inscription is a small 32×32-pixel image with characters only 3 to 5 pixels tall, rather than simply enlarging the text to read it, he rendered the candidate phrases using 1990s-era fonts, applied processes such as scaling, and compared them to the original image.He quantified the differences on a pixel-by-pixel basis and verified various combinations of character strings, fonts, and image processing methods.
The comparison spanned approximately 470 fonts from that era and 4,583 modern fonts, and he concluded that the best match was Adobe’s “Palatino Bold Italic” from 1990.
Regarding the first word in the top row, “Eternal” yielded the best results out of approximately 1.24 million candidates—which included real words and nonsensical character strings. Although they also compared readings such as “L is real 2401,” none came as close to the original image as the string presented here.
mochi64 interpreted these two lines as a Japanese-style commemorative inscription that combines a name with a wish.However, these results have not been confirmed by Nintendo, and third-party verification is still needed. Additionally, the “so” at the end is said to have a lower confidence score than the other words, so the user has published the analysis code and results on GitHub and is calling for verification using alternative readings.
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