Are Super Mario’s Mushrooms a Reference to Hallucinogenic Drugs?
Here’s the weird thing about keeping a website like this one. While most people have little to no reaction to the news that you’re telling stories about the origins of video game characters and concepts, some of the people who do have a reaction immediately want you to write about some random thing that they insist is not only interesting but also factually correct. They are not infrequently wrong on one or both counts; either the thing they’re suggesting has been covered to death or it’s based on some unfounded rumor that people in the know have already disproven.
For example, someone once tried to tell me that Pac-Man got his name because he looked like a hockey puck. In a very friendly manner, I tried to explain that I’d already written about how this story just isn’t true, but this person countered that I was the one who was wrong. In a somewhat less friendly manner, I pointed out that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not a reliable source for video game history, and then this person said something to the effect of “Actually, I read it on Wikipedia.” And to him, this revelation shut me down. To me, it only proved that the conversation did not need to continue.
Another guy, upon hearing about this site, trotted out something I hadn’t heard since junior high: “Dude, did you know that the mushrooms in Super Mario Bros. are, like, based on real-life hallucinogenic mushrooms?” Not only did my gut tell me that this might not be true, but also it seemed like the kind of non-truth that thrives because it’s too juicy to simply go away. Anytime a beloved childhood pastime can be linked to sex, drugs or the devil, the lurid thrill of that thing losing its innocence is enough to make people believe the story and then repeat it without checking the facts. I mean, remember the penis tower on the cover of The Little Mermaid VHS? And that one actually *was* true in that there really was a structure that looked like a penis. The whole backstory about a disgruntled artist drawing it in as some kind of weird revenge against Disney is pure bullshit, but the structure was removed from subsequent Little Mermaid materials, ensuring the future schoolchildren had to find a different way to learn about hidden penises in popular media.
Everything I know about Nintendo — and I know a lot — led me to believe that the similarities between Mario’s mushrooms and the hallucinogenic kind were likely coincidental, but this guy was insistent and offered some evidence. I wasn’t convinced, and I eventually changed the subject. Years later, however, I’ve finally looked into what if any truth lies in this Mushroom Kingdom urban legend. Here’s what I found.
What is true, at least, is that the first version of the English-language instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. referred to the base-level power-up as a Magic Mushroom. This strikes me as oddly un-Nintendo-like, since that term had referred to hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms going back decades. Drug slang is difficult to track in the written record, but a 1957 issue of the very normie-friendly magazine Life featured a photo essay titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” proving a mainstream awareness of the term going back at least that far. It’s even more unnecessary because the same manual describes Mario’s powered-up form as Super Mario, hence the title of the game. If the Fire Flower turns Mario into Fire Mario, shouldn’t it be a Super Mushroom that turns Mario into Super Mario?
Later repackagings of this title word drop the druggie-adjacent terminology. The Super Mario All-Stars manual, for example, just refers to the item as a Mushroom, no adjective, and the Super Mario Deluxe manual puts it in line with the other games, calling it a Super Mushroom, which is how the series referred to it starting with Super Mario Bros. 3.
Oddly, the Japanese version of the original Super Mario Bros. manual refers to the item in two different ways on the same page. In the box showing the three power-ups side by side, it’s just mushroom (キノコ, kinoko), but then in the flowchart showing the different effects of the power-up, it’s Super Mushroom (スーパー キノコ, Sūpā Kinoko). So whoever wrote the English manual had to decide twice in favor of a name that lent itself to drug comparisons when no such connection existed in the original Japanese text.
The original Super Mario Bros. is also an outlier in that it’s the only game in the series that I can recall in which the mushroom was displayed as having a yellow cap with red spots. Again, I’m not sure why except for perhaps that Nintendo hadn’t yet settled on the aesthetic for what would become of the series’ most iconic symbols. It wasn’t technical limitations, because you can find other sprites in the game that feature red and white together — the red Koopa Troopa for one, and the original Princess Peach sprite for another. Starting with Super Mario Bros. 3, the item would always be red and white, though it took until Super Mario Bros. 2 to get to the standard of white spots on a red background. (And don’t forget that Super Mario Bros. 3 was made before the western version of Super Mario Bros. 2, hence its aesthetics being more refined.)
Super Mario mushroom evolution! Clockwise from top-left: Super Mario Bros., The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario Bros. 2. For the purposes of this post, I’m considering The Lost Levels to be a minor visual tweak to the original game, and not a complete graphic overhaul the way SMB2 and SMB3 were.
Only in Super Mario World is the look of the Super Mushroom essentially locked in: red cap, white spots, and cold, unfeeling eyes staring at you from the stem, per the requirement back in the day that all Super Mario objects have faces. The remakes in Super Mario All-Stars would correct previous versions to match the “finalized” color scheme.
Clockwise from top-left: Super Mario World, and then the Super Mario All-Stars versions of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3. Only the SMB2 one would lack eyes, despite the fact that all the vegetables in the game do have eyes. Illogical!
That particular aesthetic is important to this conversation because it happens to be associated with a different type of hallucinogenic mushroom: not Psilocybe cubensis, a tropical species, but Amanita muscaria, which is found in northern climes. This latter species goes by many names, including fly agaric, but people who grew up playing Nintendo games might spot it out in the wild and just refer to it as a Super Mario mushroom, because it looks remarkably like the ones in the video games.
This is the Euro-Asian variety, which looks the most like the Super Mario version, although subspecies sport other cap colors — yellow, orange, tan, peach — and warty “spots” with different textures. (Via Wikipedia.)
In fact, in Super Mario RPG, there is even a mushroom enemy that in the English localization is called Amanita, indicating that at least some Nintendo of America employees were aware of the visual resemblance.
FWIW, the original Japanese name, ポピン (Popin), does not allude to hallucinogenic mushrooms in any way that I can tell.
The effect of ingesting these mushrooms is different. Those eating Psilocybe cubensis — again, the one most identified with the term magic mushroom — may experience warped vision (including more vivid colors and the apparent animation of stationary patterns) and also auditory hallucinations. And while they might feel digestive discomfort, the chances of becoming dangerously sick are low. As for those eating Amanita muscaria — which I should point out is generally not referred to as a magic mushroom — they are at a greater risk; in addition to experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, synesthesia, general calm or even euphoria, those consuming this mushroom might also suffer low blood pressure, a loss of motor control, a loss of equilibrium, seizure and coma, depending on the dose. It’s worth pointing out that in the case of both types of mushrooms, the psychoactive properties are the organism’s method of deterring animals from eating it. But then again so is the spice of a hot pepper or the bite of alliums like onions and garlic, so one species’ self-defense mechanism is another’s motivation to seek it out. Nature is weird that way.
One of the effects of Amanita muscaria that comes up particularly often in conversation about the Super Mario games is a neurological phenomenon known as dysmetropsia or Alice in Wonderland syndrome. People experiencing this condition feel that objects are either larger or smaller than they should be, but also nearer or farther away than they actually are. Mushrooms aren’t the only cause; it’s more common for people to experience it in conjunction with migraines or encephalitis, among other things. But this is notable because the primary function of the mushroom in the Super Mario games is to make Mario grow bigger.
In my head, at least, this isn’t the clincher that the guy who really tried to sell me on the Super Mario connection to narcotics thought it was. Alice in Wonderland syndrome encompasses all manner of distorted perception of size and relative placement of the things around you; your hands might appear unusually small, making you feel like you’ve shrunk, or your feet might appear unnaturally far away, making you feel like you’ve grown. The Super Mario mushrooms only do one thing, and that’s to make Mario physically larger — not appear to grow, but actually grow. The other aspects of Alice in Wonderland syndrome aren’t generally represented. Only with the release of New Super Mario Bros. in 2006 did Mario get to shrink down with the addition of the Mini Mushroom to the mix of superpowered funguses.
It’s worth pointing out that the Super Mario games have an odd relationship with Alice in Wonderland, which itself is often conjectured to be about drugs in some way, even if that’s an association that came more from Jefferson Airplane than from Lewis Carroll himself. In a 2005 interview with Business Week, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto specifically cited the book as an inspiration for the mechanics of Super Mario Bros.
It started with a simple idea. I thought: “I wonder what it would be like to have a character that bounces around. And the background should be a clear, blue sky.” I took that idea to a programmer, and we started working on it. Mario ended up being too big, so we shrank him. Then we thought, “What if he can grow and shrink? How would he do that? It would have to be a magic mushroom! Where would a mushroom grow? In a forest.” We thought of giving Mario a girlfriend, and then we started talking about Alice in Wonderland.
That seems pretty straightforward to me, although I have to admit that in the way the quote is translated into English, Miyamoto doesn’t say that the growing and shrinking mechanic specifically was inspired by Alice in Wonderland — only that it came up in some vague connection with the idea of Mario having a love interest. About a year later, when doing an Iwata Asks roundtable interview in promotion of New Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto either backpedaled or clarified that this was not the connection he had intended to make.
Well, the mushroom… When you think about Wonderland, you think about mushrooms, right? … Some time ago I was being interviewed and I spoke about Alice in Wonderland. But it seems there was some misunderstanding, and it’s since been stated that I was influenced by Alice in Wonderland. That isn’t the case. It’s just that there has always somehow been a relationship between mushrooms and magical realms. That’s why I decided that Mario would need a mushroom to become Super Mario.
This might seem like a weird distinction for Miyamoto to make. In both the original text and in the 1951 animated Disney film, Alice must eat from either side of the caterpillar’s mushroom in order to reach the precise height she wants to be. At first glance, this seems like an obvious inspiration for Mario’s own mushroom-related growth spurts.
Don’t confuse this with the later segment with the “eat me” cake and the “drink me” potion, which also cause Alice to grow and shrink.
Although it might be wear Mario’s growth mechanics came from, after-the-fact clarification notwithstanding, Miyamoto is nonetheless correct when he claims that mushrooms have a longstanding association with magical realms and the fey in general. The term for the natural, circular pattern in which mushrooms sometimes grow is fairy ring, after all, and European folklore imbues these spots with considerable power, sometimes causing good luck, sometimes bad, and sometimes sending those who tread into them to alternate worlds, not unlike Mario and Luigi being spirited away to the Mushroom Kingdom.
If you’re wondering why humans would attribute such otherworldly associations to this phenomenon, it could be as simple as the fact that fairy rings don’t seem like something that would occur without some sentient creatures organizing them. They seem unnatural, but also they’re something that ordinary humans shouldn’t know how to do, so obviously, the only ones with the power to pull something like this off would be fairies. Or witches. Or ghosts. Or the devil. But because the vast majority are formed with regular, run-of-the-mill mushrooms, we can’t credit the magical properties of fairy rings to the hallucinogenic effects of the psilocybins or the amanitas.
The Fairy Ring, by English painter Walter Jenks Morgan, circa 1870–1880.
That said, the hallucinogenic ones have a place in fungal folklore — and the Super Mario games as well — but I’m willing to wager that the connection is aesthetic in nature rather than spiritual, mystical or hallucinogenic.
The genesis of this post, aside from that one conversation with the guy who insisted he knew more about the cross-section of Super Mario Bros. and narcotics than I did, was a December 2024 episode of the podcast Let’s Get Haunted about the alleged role of Amanita muscaria in lore surrounding Santa Claus and his reindeer. I’m not sure I agree with the connections the hosts make between the traditions of the Sámi people and modern Christmas celebrations. National Geographic debunked many of these connections in a 2023 article, and there’s also more pointed criticism stating that repeating claims of a Sámi-Santa Claus connection, mushroom-related or not, is actively harmful. But one of the points the hosts make that I do agree with is that, aesthetically speaking, this particular mushroom cap is a winner. It’s basically Minnie Mouse’s signature look — bright red with white spots, polka dot-style. It would catch the attention of anyone taking a hike through the forest, and it’s also one that humans have reproduced, not for any shamanic or narcotic associations, but just because it’s pleasing to the eye.
There’s a famous image mentioned in the Let’s Get Haunted episode that, per the telling of it, depicts a female shaman holding a pair of amanitas but also wearing clothes that duplicate the mushroom’s polka dot pattern. For the life of me, I could not determine where the photo originally came from — if you know, please tell me — but regardless of any ceremonial significance the pattern might have, the photo has value purely on grounds that it’s documenting how humans have turned it into a meme — in the anthropological sense and not the online humor sense. This striking natural display has escaped the realm of mushrooms and been translated that of humans, who reproduced it again and again without necessarily understanding the original context. That’s how memes work, after all.
Most searches for this photo this only turn up content regurgitating the claims of the connection between the amanita and Christmas. As a result, this shaman too has become a meme. But yeah, the popularity of the Sámi-Santa connection has made it harder to research this photo specifically and this subject in general.
The amanita aesthetic shows up often in vintage Christmas cards, for example. For people who believe that real-life rituals involving this mushroom helped shape Christmas traditions, this is proof of a cause-and-effect relationship. But it doesn’t have to be. The fact that Amanita muscaria grow at the roots of trees — not exclusively pines but yes, often pines — and the fact that in North America they often do so in the months leading up to Christmas just make them a symbol of the season that’s all the more appropriate because they happen to be the same colors as we associate with Santa Claus.
This is just one example, but seriously, just do an image search for “vintage mushroom christmas” or something thereabouts, and you’ll be astonished how much comes up. Or perhaps you won’t be surprised, considering how well the colors mesh with the season.
Fairly quickly, the hallucinogenic associations got lost, and this mushroom just became a symbol of the general Christmas trend of bringing the woodlands into the home, of a quainter and more rural time, of old ways that we have reverence for even if we don’t understand them.
It didn’t even remain specifically Christmas-related. Hop online and search “70s mushroom decor” to see how mainstream this look became. The colors shift from specifically red with white spots to the rest of this decade’s palette — orange, gold, avocado, chocolate brown — but the pattern is the same. My own grandmother, who existed about as far away from any drug subculture as a human could, owned dish towels bearing a spotted mushroom motif just because this was a common household thing back in the day. When I inherited most of her housewares, the one remaining from this set features yellow with green spots and orange with brown, but no red with white.
I like this artifact from the age of mushroom decor so much that I framed it. It’s hanging in my laundry room.
Notably, the amanita aesthetic shows up in The Smurfs — and specifically the animated adaptation that debuted in the U.S. in 1981 and in Japan in 1982, shortly before Nintendo would have begun work on Super Mario Bros. The Smurfs live in mushroom houses that almost always feature a spotted pattern. It’s not always the Minnie Mouse look, but even when it’s not, it’s derivative of that particular mushroom aesthetic. (And BTW, Smurfs come up more than once in my piece on Toad’s gender. Toads and Smurfs have more in common than you might think.)
Per the Japanese Wikipedia page on the Smurfs (or スマーフ, Sumafu), it doesn’t seem like the cartoon series was especially popular in Japan, but Peyo’s original comics were popular enough receive Japanese translations up to and beyond the 2011 CGI movie.
This might seem fairly far afield from hallucinogenic mushrooms, but that’s the point. There’s maybe nothing in pop culture more anodyne than the Smurfs, but that just goes to show you how something that might have begun with a close, specific association with narcotics can lose that over time, especially if the visual signifier has value on its own.
I would point you toward another famous instance of this in the Super Mario games: Despite the fact that the tanuki is a Japanese animal with its own folklore associations in Japanese culture, the tail that Mario sports in Super Mario Bros. 3 is actually that of the North American raccoon. That might seem odd, given that Nintendo is a Japanese company and the inclusion of the tanuki in SMB3 would seem to be Nintendo celebrating its cultural heritage. However, the raccoon aesthetic’s presence in the game and in subsequent depictions of tanuki, Nintendo-related and not, can be explained away easily enough by pointing out that the ring-striped tail just looks cool. Like the Amanita muscaria’s white spots on a red background, it stands out, it catches the eye and it makes the people taken with the aesthetic want to reproduce it in their creative endeavors.
So let’s get back to the question posed in the title of this piece: Are Super Mario’s mushrooms a reference to hallucinogenic drugs? Well… in a sense, sort of. Though I hate to validate that guy who insisted he was right, you can draw a line from the hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria growing out in the wild before human culture existed to the video game pixels reproducing its signature aesthetic in the Super Mario games. In another sense, however, hell no — that guy was wrong because that narrative ignores the complexities of how visual signifiers get disconnected from their origins to the point that people are reproducing them without the slightest understanding of where the thing came from.
For me, and for the purposes of this website, it’s a lot more interesting to count off the slight changes in meaning as something shifts from one part of culture to another, even if I know that tidier explanations are the ones that people want to repeat. It’s easier to tell the story of how there’s a drug reference that’s just barely hidden beneath the surface of Super Mario Bros. or that some artist purposefully drew a penis tower into the Little Mermaid cover art or that Sámi mushroom traditions shaped how we celebrate Christmas today. But in repeating those stories, you have to leave out a lot of the details that make those worth telling in the first place.
Miscellaneous Notes
Believe it or not, I actually tried to minimize tangents in this piece. One of the elements I wanted to include but couldn’t find a place for was an explanation of spotted mushrooms that aren’t the Amanita muscaria, to see if any of them come close to approximating the way the amanita looks. I’m not a mushroom expert, but no, as near as I could tell, none of the other ones did. I found reports of the tricholoma having spots, but no examples I could find looked much like the amanita, nor did the lepiota. Of all of them, maybe the lactarius came closest, but it’s nothing that seems mistakable for the amanita. Do let me know if some other mushroom comes closer to ganking this signature look.
There’s a 2015 interview Miyamoto did with NPR in which he seems to tiptoe around the Alice in Wonderland connection once again. He acknowledges that the book inspired game mechanics but only in the broadest possible way.
In the original Mario Bros., Mario and Luigi were rather small in size and they would play and battle against each other in that game. And in the Super Mario Bros. game, those same small characters are in the game, but when they get a mushroom they get big. So we decided to call the big versions of them Super Mario and Super Luigi because they got super-sized. … [O]f course, getting an item and growing big is sort of a mysterious thing to have happen. And so we thought, what's the most mysterious item that we could make this so it makes sense why they’re getting bigger? And if you think of stories like Alice in Wonderland and other types of fairy tales, mushrooms always seem to have a mysterious power, and so we thought the mushroom would be a good symbol for why they get it and get big.
And in 2010, Evan Narcisse interviewed Miyamoto for Time magazine, and again, Alice comes up but not in a way that tells us much that’s concrete.
Narcisse: One of the things I’ve read is that the magic mushrooms in the Super Mario games come from myths about enchanted food. Is that true?
Miyamoto: Whether or not this is actually a factor or not, we’re not really sure. But this whole idea of mysterious foods that have mysterious properties comes from a lot of the European folktales. Of course, you see foods like that in Alice in Wonderland. I’m not really sure if the Japanese folk really knew what we were referencing. But that was sort of kind of where it was coming from. At least I think that’s what it came from.
Just because it’s a strange-sounding word, at least to me, I wanted to explain why the Amanita muscaria is also known as the fly agaric. The latter word comes from the Greek agarikon and essentially just means “tree fungus.” In English, the word agaric just means a mushroom where the cap is differentiated from the stem, patio umbrella-style, with ribbing on the underside of the cap. The association with flies comes from the belief that when powdered in milk it could kill flies, and in fact the species name muscaria comes from the Latin musca, meaning “fly.”
You may be surprised to see that I got through an entire article about mushrooms in the Super Mario games without mentioning Goombas. Surprise! They’re not really mushrooms. They’re chestnuts. The etymology of their English name, however, is super interesting and does swing back into mushroom territory, though by way of Hungarian and not the Italian you might expect.
Finally, I should point out that Nintendo isn’t above putting hallucinogenic reference into Super Mario games. Yoshi’s Island famously features a stage titled “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy” where you can essentially make Yoshi trip out. The stage introduces enemies called Fuzzies, which are different from the similarly named enemies that debuted in Super Mario World, and while they can’t hurt you specifically, touching them causes the ground to wobble, the colors onscreen to change, the music to become distorted and Yoshi to become harder to control.
It’s not mushroom-related, because previous entries in the series had made it clear that mushrooms were a force for good, but it’s hard not to compare their effect to a bad experience on shrooms. So yeah, there is at least one Super Mario game with an apparent drug reference, and it’s a lot more blatant that coded mushroom mythology.