Answer: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The classic video game Super Mario Bros. has more than a few similarities to the iconic novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland including magic mushrooms, anthropomorphic animals, mysterious portals and passageways, and an all around sort of suspension of reality as we know it that marks both trips through the game and the novel. The comparison isn’t merely the parlor talk of video game geeks though, as Super Mario Bros. creator Miyamoto himself cited the influence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in an interview with Business Week magazine:

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.