New text candidates have emerged for the blurry stone tablet on the fountain in Princess Peach's Castle in Super Mario 64. Through computational analysis, programmer Mochi64 believes the two lines most closely resemble "Eternal Star" and "We Hope So," rather than the "L is Real 2401" theory that has circulated for nearly 30 years.
This stone tablet has long been associated with theories about unlocking Luigi and hidden numerical clues. Instead of simply enlarging the image, Mochi64 reverse-engineered the words, fonts, and scaling methods likely used by artists in the 1990s, then compared the generated pixels with the game's original texture.
The original text on the stone tablet is contained within a 32×32 pixel texture. The characters in the two lines are only 3 to 5 pixels high, so ordinary magnification cannot restore the missing details, and visual identification is easily influenced by subjective expectations. Mochi64 released the analysis code and tested over 1.2 million words and millions of combinations.
The method scores candidate results based on the degree of pixel mismatch, with lower scores indicating closer resemblance to the original image. The combination "Eternal Star / We Hope So" received a score of 1129, while "L is Real 2401" scored 2031 for the first line alone. Mochi64 also issued a challenge, inviting others to use the same code to find answers with lower scores.
This result is a candidate derived from computational matching and has not been confirmed by Nintendo. The stone tablet has long been linked to Luigi rumors, which also relate to Shigeru Miyamoto's revelation that Luigi was removed during late development due to memory constraints; Luigi's character model also appeared in files leaked in 2020.