Image: reddit.com · I used Claude to reverse-engineer a 30-year-old Super Mario 64 texture that nobody could read, and found what it says
Mario 64 courtyard plaque text decoded from a 32x32 texture
Claude built a model of the 1996 texture pipeline and a GPU font search to work out what the unreadable plaque says.
Credits
Earliest dated source:
The full story
The plaque on the star statue in Super Mario 64's castle courtyard is a single 32x32 texture with letters only 3 to 5 pixels tall, and fans have argued about what it says since the 90s. Rather than try to read it, the poster had Claude (Opus 5.5) rebuild how it was made: text in a font on a small canvas, resized to 32x32, blurred and laid on the stone.
Claude then wrote a PyTorch search over that model and about 530 fonts from the era, scored against the real pixels from the ROM, plus a dictionary search for the second line and a test harness using fake plaques with planted text. The result reads "Eternal Star / We hope so" in Adobe's 1990 Palatino Bold Italic. The post also gives a 40-page report and an open-source package.
How it was done
Tools
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: I used Claude to reverse-engineer a 30-year-old Super Mario 64 texture that nobody could read, and f
The maker's post on r/ClaudeCode.
The subreddit's moderators removed it, but the original is still readable (it can take a few seconds to load): archived copy of Reddit: I used Claude to reverse-engineer a 30-year-old Super Mario 64 texture that nobody could read, and f (opens in a new tab)
- Reddit: I used Claude (Opus 5.5) to crack a 30-year-old Super Mario 64 mystery: the unreadable couReddit poster: decoratorPosted
If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: I used Claude (Opus 5.5) to crack a 30-year-old Super Mario 64 mystery: the unreadable cou (opens in a new tab)