Fans of Super Mario 64 have long assumed an unintelligible message within the game read ‘L is real’ but new evidence suggests otherwise.
Nowadays, it’s easy to uncover hidden secrets in video games through datamining and such, but that wasn’t the case back in the old days. As a result, there’s still plenty of old school secrets that have never been found or explained.
The most recent example concerns 1996’s Super Mario 64 and its ‘L is real’ message, which has been a common point of trivia among fans and was long speculated to be a hint at a playable Luigi.
However, it’s now claimed that everybody has been misreading the message all these years and that it says something else entirely, potentially putting to bed this 30-year-old mystery.
For any young’uns reading this, in Super Mario 64’s castle hub world, there is a courtyard with a fountain. It’s not hidden and is something you’ll naturally come across when exploring, but the fountain has a plaque with unintelligible text written on it.
At the time of the game’s release, it was speculated to read ‘L is real 2401’but modern re-releases have never made it any clearer, even with enhanced resolutions.
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According to a YouTuber by the name of mochi64, the two lines of text are too small for a simple upscaling to reveal what they say. That’s why they put together a program that they claim, ‘simulates how a 1996 artist made it and searches for the text that best explains the stored pixels.’
They explain their process in a video, but the long and short of it is that they had their program analyse millions of word and font combinations to find the best match. Essentially, they worked backwards to figure out which words and font were used by the artist who wrote that text and placed it on the fountain.
There are accusations that AI was used in the process in the YouTube comments; something which mochi64 has not gone out of their way to deny.
Ultimately, mochi64 concludes that the first line of text reads, ‘Eternal Star,’ while the second says, ‘We hope so.’ Although they’ve made their program open source so people can test it themselves.
So, what is this really hinting at if not Luigi? Well, probably nothing. It could just be a reference to how Mario is collecting stars to progress through the game or even just the star statue on the fountain.
There is a board in the first Mario Party game called Eternal Star, but that came out two years after Super Mario 64.
Nintendo is unlikely to ever offer an official explanation for the choice of phrase, but there’s probably no deeper meaning behind it, since we can’t imagine whoever wrote it expected people to obsess over it for the next three decades.
As for the whole playable Luigi thing, an old interview with Super Mario 64 director Shigeru Miyamoto did reveal that he was in the game at one point but was cut due to memory issues. So, no, he’s not a secret unlockable.
This hasn’t been the only Nintendo retro discovery as of late. Earlier this month, an F-Zero fan uncovered secret cheat codes for 2003 GameCube game F-Zero GX.
These codes unlock all racecourses, vehicles, and the special gold machine parts that were only obtainable from in-person events in Japan. They even work with the version of the game available via the Switch 2’s classics library.
The only catch is that some of them need to be inputted on four controllers simultaneously, which would explain why they’ve been hidden for so long.
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