[chc4]

A lot of fuzzers use Mario or other simple games as an internal testcase. I'm aware of a hypervisor fuzzer from 2016 that did it, and I'm positive there are others (both before and since). Hell, tom7 has a fuzzer for exploring program states that uses Super Mario Bros as the example from 2013 (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf, plus a youtube video https://youtu.be/xOCurBYI_gY), and he's definitely not the first either.

[wwilson]

We are huge fans of tom7 and that paper was one of our inspirations for using NES as a domain for researching autonomous state space search! I think he does a very good job of explaining why the problem is hard.

[chc4]

Right, in case it wasn't clear to readers this isn't a bad thing. Lots of people use games because they're good analogs for other programs and evocatively show fuzzing exploration progress. Not being the first to point a fuzzer at Mario doesn't matter.

[mrkmarron]

Thanks for sharing, I felt like there were earlier but the x,y trick jumped out at me and that was the one I remembered off the top of my head.