Pac-Man As Pot Head
1up.com has a look at the history of drugs in games, from the pellet-popping days of Pac-Man to the industrious sales efforts of the GTA games. From the article: "As games drew a wider audience, not to mention a wider variety of creative talents (some pretty weird stuff reportedly went on at the Atari offices in an evening), they necessarily drew on a wider spectrum of influences and inspirations...some of them chemical in nature. There have been games that were probably made on drugs -- Rez springs to mind, or the Virtual Light Machine -- and even reviewed on drugs, when A.C. Styles dosed the office coffee pot at Die Hard Game Fan."
Ya know how many (most?) side scrolling games have those terminal gaps in the map, the bottomless pits you gotta jump over? Well, in Super Mario Brothers, the lovable Yoshi would invariably head for one of those cracks as soon as you lost control of him. Me and my girlfriend at the time used to spend many, many hours smoking cigarettes and all sorts of groovy things whilst playing this game, and "Yoshi's a crackhead!" became a constant refrain.
Oh, and, uhh, the mushrooms? Hello! Waiter, could we get some subtlety over here? Thanks.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?