If you were gaming back in 1996, there’s a good chance you heard a rumour. Maybe you saw it in a magazine, or it was whispered to you in the schoolyard, but either way the gossip was consistent: Luigi was in Mario 64.
The rumour was relentless, and the appetite for Mario’s brother grew by the day. IGN, however, struggled to believe it was true. In an effort to dispel the myth once and for all, in 1996 we posted a bounty. The message was simple: Prove Luigi is in the game and we will pay you $100.
Countless tried, none succeeded. And after 24 years people moved on, forgetting they’d ever cared about the missing plumber being in the iconic 3D platformer.
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, Nintendo's source code was exposed to the world, and buried in there was a lead. Luigi, it appeared, was there, hidden in a place where nobody could look. But now, thanks to a data breach dubbed the “Gigaleak” and some clever sleuthing, he was finally exposed to the world.
So now, 30 years later, it’s time to finish this. Let’s settle this bounty once and for all.
L is Real 2401
Before Super Mario 64 arrived in 1996, it was inconceivable that Mario’s first jump to three dimensions would happen without his brother. Together, they formed the titular Mario Bros we’d seen together since 1985. But the inconceivable happened – Mario 64 was a solo adventure for Nintendo’s original jumping man. That wasn’t the original plan, though. In an interview for the game’s official Japanese strategy guide, creator Shigeru Miyamoto explained that the team had been forced to omit Luigi, stating that “ultimately, due to memory issues, we had to take him out.”
So, Luigi was never in Mario 64. Open and shut case, you’d assume. But that didn’t stop the rumours spreading like wildfire.
“Everyone thought that Luigi was somewhere hidden in Mario 64,” explains IGN’s news editor, Tom Phillips, a lifelong Nintendo fan who was working as a reporter for Eurogamer during the events of the 2020 Nintendo Gigaleak. “It was the era of secrets that you couldn't just look up on the internet. It was the era of myths about video game easter eggs that you would whisper to each other as you were playing, or you would talk about them in the playground. Everybody had a theory about where Luigi was in Super Mario 64.”
This hearsay about Luigi wasn’t completely unfounded. Its origins all stemmed from a simple, practically unreadable sign in the courtyard of Peach’s castle.
“The text on the sign, I'm pretty sure, was just nonsense,” says Phillips. “But people thought it said: L is real 2401."
“People from that took that, yes, Luigi is in the game, and you had to do something to find him, whether that was collect 2,401 stars or jump 2,401 times in a specific spot. But [fans assumed] it was a message from Shigeru Miyamoto himself, saying that Luigi was waiting somewhere for you to go find.”
Super Mario 64 was like nothing else on the market in 1996, defining not only the rules for all 3D platformers but also quickly establishing itself as one of the greatest video games of all time. But perhaps where it stood out the most, at least to a legion of Luigi obsessives, was the sheer volume of secrets you could find.
“It's a remarkable game. I was in awe,” shares IGN co-founder Douglass C. Perry. “There were so many little hidden things throughout the game that made it so much fun to explore. The sense of discovery was one of the things that made it so remarkable and long-lasting. There are so many secrets that it made you feel like Luigi could be in there. “
But despite the community's best efforts, Luigi was nowhere to be found. After collecting all 120 stars, players were rewarded with a secret Yoshi hidden right at the start of the game. But no matter how hard they looked, there was no trace of the moustachioed brother. He would eventually arrive in the Nintendo DS port of the game, but many fans were still convinced he was in the original.
“I would love for Luigi to truly be in the game,” says Perry. I think that would be amazing, but that doesn't mean that he's there.”
The audience, armed with a hidden message, was undeterred. Luigi had to be in the game, and ‘L is Real 2401’ was the clue they needed. At the same time, a burgeoning website called N64.com launched and was quickly inundated with questions about the missing plumber. In an effort to dispel the myth once and for all, Douglass C. Perry, who was a young editor at the site, decided to put his money where his mouth was and offer a $100 bounty to anyone who could solve this mystery. It was a call to arms that he’d very quickly regret…
The Search For Luigi
The staff of N64.com, which would later change its name to IGN64 and then just IGN, thought nothing of their bounty story. It was just one article towards a daily quota, and the assumption was it would be forgotten in less time than it took to post it…
"Hey, Doug, can you write five stories a day?" recalls Perry. “I was like, ’Yeah, I can do it,’ blindly accepting the challenge. And so we were constantly looking for things to write. And of course, these emails started coming in about Luigi, and we were like, ‘He's not in the game, we would've found him by now,’ but the emails were relentless. Finally, I was like, well, fine, let's just put the challenge out there for players to find Luigi. Because if he's in there, someone's going to find it.
“I said, ’If you can find Luigi in the game, show us the steps and pictures, and we'll reward you.’ Well, that was just the biggest mistake I think I'd ever made…”
In 1996, the internet was in its infancy, so the idea of the answer being a quick Google search away was a distant, warp-pipe dream. In the late ‘90s, rumours such as the ability to revive Aerith in Final Fantasy 7, or a secret code to reduce Lara Croft to her bare pixels, were prevalent in schoolyards. Fans laboured over these urban myths, waiting months at a time for them to be either solved or dispelled by magazines.
The internet, though, had begun to speed up this process, and with $100 on the line, the audience wasn’t going to wait patiently for their answers.
“We had mountains of emails coming in, just relentless,” shares Perry. “I hadn't really thought past the challenge part. I was like, ‘Oh, I have to follow all these emails, instructions and go through every single one of these challenges to find out if he's actually in there.’
“It was an enormous amount of work, and I didn’t think he was in there. None of them worked!”
The staff at N64.com were confident Luigi wasn’t in the game, but others still desperately sought confirmation. Two years later, in response to an ardent fan, Nintendo of America sent a letter confirming that ‘L is Real’ was simply a joke placed by developers, although evidence of that letter wouldn’t make its way onto gaming forums until many years later, and that’s assuming it was even legitimate. So, for most, true confirmation was still decades away.
“I was reading Nintendo Power and all the magazines, and there was nothing,” says Perry. “ I literally tried a hundred different ways to unlock Luigi, and none of them worked, but it didn't stop the emails from coming.”
What started out as a fun article had spiralled out of control with no end in sight. Miyamoto had confirmed he wasn’t there, Nintendo of America confirmed he wasn’t there, and not a single person could confirm to IGN they’d ever had a whiff of Luigi. All they had was ‘L is Real 2401’.
That was until 24 years and 01 month later…
The Gigaleak
In July 2020, details of secret Nintendo development data began to surface. What started off as a trickle of information quickly spiralled into one of the biggest video game leaks in history.
“I was working at Eurogamer at the time, and my job was to write the news,’ explains Phillips.” And I remember seeing this pop up online, and it just spread like wildfire across social media, Reddit, Resetera, and all the video game forums.
“I thought it was a fake at first, but seemingly it was legit.”
Enormous amounts of development information began pouring out as eager fans mined the hacked data, desperate to learn more about Nintendo. Fans were quick to dub this enormous data breach the “Gigaleak” as they sifted through mountains of designs, prototypes and source material that Nintendo never intended to see the light of day.
One person whose curiosity was piqued by the news was an anonymous software engineer/visual artist (and passionate Super Mario 64 fan) known only as GlitchyPSI. With potentially massive Mario revelations ready for the taking, they were keen to dive into the Gigaleak to see what they could discover.
“It was like finding some kind of treasure, even though there was questionable legality over it,” explains Glitchy. “It was kind of like, ’Damn, this is kind of scary.’”
“There were a lot of comments by people, I believe, who actually work on this stuff. I believe a Starfox developer said something about disrespecting people's work by doing this. There was a lot of fear, but in my circles, there was also a lot of excitement because people wanted to see the assets themselves.”
“I sort of adhere to the argument that this stuff is just so interesting and important for fans of Nintendo games and for fans of video games as a medium,” says Phillips. “It's a part of our culture. And I think the more we know about it, the better, whether Nintendo agrees with that or not.”
“The files were 'encrypted’,” explains Glitchy. “So you had to run a tool to get to the contents of the actual files as they were laid out in the file system, but you can imagine what else I found in there.”
What was discovered was a treasure trove of unreleased Nintendo content. There were prototypes for games like Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Kart, and Star Fox 2. Mini-games that never saw the light of day, unused art assets, and location and character beta designs.
“I was refreshing that page, trying to see the latest stuff pieced together from it,” shares Phillips. “You never ever see how the product is made. And so that was what was so exciting about the Gigleak: to see the work-in-progress versions, the things that were left on the cutting room floor. This is stuff that you, as a Nintendo fan myself, just never get to see.”
The Gigleak was a goldmine for any Nintendo fan. But once word got out that there was source code for an early build of Super Mario 64, Glitchy and co immediately got to work. “So I checked the source file. There were no raw images, but I noticed something.”
Glitchy immediately recognised the code language they’d used in modding tools for fan-made Nintendo 64 projects. The file structure was similar, so it made sense that they could find a way to dive deeper.
“Maybe with the tools, people can recreate stuff,” thought Glitchy. “I already had experience with textures.
“I made a little program to take the raw data that was in textures, defined byte by byte. It would take that and convert it to a PNG. I showed this to people in Discord, and they were like, ‘Oh damn, maybe we can find more texture this way.'”
Not only did they discover more textures in the source code, but Glitchy found something that would change the history of the L is Real movement forever. A texture of a white circle, with a green L.
“I don't want to toot my own horn, but it is probably true that I was the first person [to find it],” he says.
The proof, although obtained by nefarious means, had finally arrived. Modders immediately got to work finding other elements and eventually pieced Luigi together in Super Mario 64. Now, although it was never released by Nintendo, there was evidence of a version of the classic game featuring Luigi.
Even though the sign in Peach’s courtyard never actually said "L Is Real 2401," the message serendipitously came true. Luigi’s textures were discovered on July 25, 2020, 24 years and 1 month after Mario 64’s original Japanese release.
Bounty Settled
30 years ago, IGN posted a $100 bounty for anyone who could prove Luigi was in Super Mario 64. It took over 24 years and the crowd-sourced data mining of illegally obtained assets to solve, but we finally had our answer. So, once and for all, 30 years later, it’s time to settle our debt.
Given the nature of the solution and the wholesome determination of the L is Real community, we’ve made a $100 donation to AbleGamers, a charity that combats social isolation, fosters inclusive communities, and improves the quality of life for people with disabilities.
In 2026, it’s hard to imagine gaming mysteries lasting more than a week. Before you know it, dedicated fans are sifting through code, breaking boundaries with free cams and searching every nook and cranny for evidence of a game’s previous iterations. So there’s something still quite magical about Nintendo and its ability to keep its secrets so closely guarded.
“There are so many projects in Nintendo's vaults that the Gigaleak did not even touch,” explains Phillips. “I feel like the world will never know all the things Nintendo came extremely close to releasing, only to pull back at the last minute. The Gigaleak was such a rare window, a rare opportunity to get some of this detail and just see this amazing process."
But Nintendo’s special skill isn’t just its ability to hold its cards close to its chest. Since the birth of its console business, Nintendo has crafted worlds full of wonder. The fact that players want to get lost in those locations and comb them for clues, and their overwhelming desire to discover more, is perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay a creator like Shigeru Miyamoto.
Mario 64 is now 30 years old, but the passion and love it’s garnered has never wavered. People never forgot about Luigi because they never wanted to forget about Super Mario 64, and even though it was the birth of the modern 3D platformer, its greatest legacy is that people are still excited about what else they’re yet to discover in its groundbreaking Mushroom Kingdom.
“There's a certain kind of genius to Shigeru Miyamoto's playfulness and his design and his curiosity, his wonder about games,” says Perry. “That's the beauty he instils in all his games, making people feel as if they're about to discover something. It makes people feel like it could be there; you just have to dig a little deeper. I think that's kind of an amazing once-in-a-lifetime genius that we may never see again.”
Dale Driver is an Associate Director of Video Programming at IGN, and once skipped revising for his exams so he could dedicate all his time to getting 120 stars in Mario 64. Be thoroughly bored by following him on Bluesky at @daledriver.bsky.social
from IGN Video Games https://ift.tt/F6p8ER2
via IFTTT
