Super Mario 64 plaque analysis suggests Eternal Star and We Hope So
An open-source project says the tiny Super Mario 64 plaque may read “Eternal Star” and “We Hope So”, not “L is Real 2401”.
A new open-source analysis has offered a fresh answer to one of Super Mario 64's longest-running mysteries: the tiny plaque near the fountain in Peach's Castle may read “Eternal Star” on its first line and “We Hope So” on its second, rather than the famous “L is Real 2401” theory.1
Millions of possible matches
The plaque has been debated for roughly 30 years. Because its lettering was drawn on a 32×32-pixel tile, modern players have never had enough detail to read it cleanly. Sharpening or enlarging the image cannot restore information that was never captured, so the mystery has always involved a large amount of educated guesswork.1
Programmer Mochi64 took a different approach. Their open-source project tested combinations of words, fonts and resizing methods to find the text that could have produced the pixels seen in the original game. The process reportedly compared more than 1.2 million words and scored each result by how closely its texture matched the plaque.1
The best match identified so far was “Eternal Star” on the top line and “We Hope So” underneath. The pair received a mismatch score of 1,129. By comparison, “L is Real 2401” scored 2,031 on the first line alone, making it a poorer match under this particular method.1
That is an important qualification. The analysis does not recover a hidden high-resolution source file from Nintendo, and Nintendo has not confirmed the text. It identifies the phrase that best fits the available pixels under a set of assumptions about how an artist might have created the sign in the mid-1990s.
Why Luigi became part of the mystery
The old “L is Real 2401” reading survived because it appeared to connect the plaque to a missing character. Fans knew that Luigi had been considered for Super Mario 64, and the idea that “2401” might be an unlock clue gave the blurry texture a larger-than-life role in the game’s mythology.1
According to interviews and contemporary material referenced by VGC, Nintendo director Shigeru Miyamoto described an early multiplayer idea in which Mario and Luigi could move around together. The mode was removed during development, reportedly in part because many players would initially own only one controller. Later footage and the 2020 Nintendo leak gave fans more reasons to connect Luigi with the unfinished parts of the game, even though that does not prove the plaque was about him.1
The new analysis separates those two ideas. Luigi may genuinely have been planned for an earlier version of the game, while the plaque may still have carried a completely different message. A compelling development story is not automatically evidence for a particular pixel reading.
Nintendo's current Nintendo 64 Classics collection lists Super Mario 64 among its included games, keeping the original title readily available to modern players.2
Our opinion
“Eternal Star” and “We Hope So” is a much less explosive answer than “L is Real 2401”, but that is part of its appeal. The result is not a definitive Nintendo reveal; it is a transparent attempt to measure what the pixels can and cannot support.
The analysis is most useful because it gives fans a method to inspect rather than merely another phrase to repeat. Its open-source code allows other people to challenge the result, test different text and examine the assumptions behind the score. If someone finds a lower mismatch with a better-supported reconstruction, the mystery can keep evolving without pretending that the plaque is readable in a way it never was.
For now, “Eternal Star” and “We Hope So” should be treated as the strongest computational suggestion reported so far, not as confirmed canon. The plaque remains a 32×32-pixel relic of Super Mario 64's development history — and Nintendo still has the final word.