Researcher Recreates Super Mario 64 Tablet Text as Eternal Star
The cottage industry around the "L is Real 2401" tablet finally has a scored, reproducible answer, with the old reading's mismatch more than twice the new one, so the mystery is now an argument about method rather than about rumor.
Reporting from 1 source: Game Spark.
A researcher who goes by mochi64 rebuilt the 32 by 32 pixel stone tablet in Super Mario 64's castle courtyard by re-rendering candidate inscriptions and scoring them against the game's image. "Eternal Star" ranked first among 1,237,405 candidates, and a search of 17,700 common English words produced "We hope so" as the second line. Nintendo has not confirmed the reading.
The full text reads, in the study's estimate, "Eternal Star / We hope so." The "L is real 2401" reading scored 2,031 on the image-mismatch scale, about 2.6 times the 789 for "Eternal Star," and a 2019 reading of "A Secret star / lie here ~" scored 4,304 against 1,129 for the new text.
The method is the point. Rather than read the 3 to 5 pixel tall characters, mochi64 re-rendered candidates the way the original artists would have shrunk them, overlaid each on the stone background, and compared pixels. "Sternal," the next real English word after "Eternal," placed 13,217th. The weakest link is the final "so," where "or," "us," and "he" score close.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.