10 Cryptic Messages Found In Video Games We'll Never Understand
7. The Courtyard Star Inscription - Super Mario 64
In Super Mario 64, players who visit the Castle Courtyard will surely notice a statue of a giant star with a blurry, indecipherable inscription below it.
Over the years there have been two key interpretations of the message: "Eternal Star", because of what the statue is depicting, or more strangely, "L is real 2401."
The latter is part of a long-held fan theory that the letter L is referring to Luigi, and that if players collected 2401 gold coins, they could unlock him as a playable character.
Though in 2016 a Redditor posted a letter they received in the year 2000 confirming the blurry inscription to have been a joke on the part of the developers, its failure to go viral meant that it largely fell upon deaf ears with the Mario 64 community.
But those who continued to maintain that the message referred to Luigi nevertheless considered themselves vindicated in July 2020, when the source code for the game was leaked in a Nintendo data breach.
The leak revealed that Luigi assets were indeed contained within the game, seemingly confirming his initial planned inclusion.
And better yet, the leak came 24 years and 1 month after the game's original June 1996 Japanese release - as in, "2401." Madness.
The waters are muddy enough at this point that the true intent of the inscription remains somewhat up in the air, and fans continue to be fascinated by it.