Super Mario 64: a coder claims to have finally deciphered the star statue plaque

For decades, Super Mario 64 players have wondered what the illegible plaque at the foot of the star statue in Peach's castle courtyard says. The best-known rumour held that it reads "L is Real 2401", a supposed code to unlock Luigi, popularised by an April 1998 hoax attributed to Nintendo Power. A coder known as Mochi64 now claims to have settled it, in posts published on October 15, 17 and 18, 2026.

Their reading: two lines, five words, "Eternal Star / We hope so". To get there, Mochi64 built a tool, partly coded with AI help, that compares the pixel height, width, shape, capitalisation and style of the characters, based on the 1990s Adobe Palatino Bold Italic font, then fills the gaps using English word probability. After "millions of computations", they conclude that "We hope for" does not fit the pixels while "We hope so" does, and they released the tool as open source so anyone can test it.

A solution far from unanimous

The finding is disputed. "Eternal Star / We hope for" was already proposed in 2023 by community members, and "Eternal Star / We hope so" was reportedly even suggested on forums about ten years ago, which weakens the idea of a brand-new solve. Commenters think the letters do not match, and point out that the tool ignores the texture's colour palette and rendering pipeline. Nintendo has not responded. The safest description is a serious but unconfirmed hypothesis.

Source: Time Extension