We Posted a $100 Mario 64 Bounty 30 Years Ago. It's Time to Settle Our Debt! - IGN

It's time to pay our debt, 30 years later.

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.

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.”