Along similar lines in both the digital and non-digital world people would include false landmarks and roads on maps to detect copying, since while facts are not protected, fake places are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
When I was at Malwarebytes we would seed our engine with "malware" that was just programs we created on an airgapped machine so we could see when other companies were just blatantly copying us.
Wow. Montgomery Ward -- source of the ad dating the game -- doesn't even exist anymore:
Montgomery Ward Inc. is the name of two historically distinct American retail enterprises. It can refer either to the defunct mail order and department store retailer, which operated between 1872 and 2001, or to the current catalog and online retailer also known as Wards.
I was thinking "Does Montgomery Ward even exist anymore? I can't recall the last time I saw one." I searched and, to my surprise, the Wards.com website came up.
Then I checked Wikipedia. Nope, it is not the website for the now defunct department store chain. It's a different entity.
In a sense adding the code to handle inputting the numbers wasn't even necessary, this easter egg is already readable by looking at the ROM dump itself, so already does its job that way
Maybe so that Mr. Glass could prove to someone non-technical that he wrote it by providing the passcode directly, whether to friends or family for "cool points" or in a legal dispute over authorship/credit/royalty rights.
Thanks. Now that you mention it, I think your scenario is 100% right! The code was long exactly because no one was ever supposed to find it, it was supposed to be for the author to use.
It's been known for quite a while that Adventure's egg wasn't the first (although Warshaw did get a lot of acknowledgement and visibility when his was believed to be the first, so it was good that we thought his was the first for a while). I think this is the third one found on the Channel F, all of which predate Adventure. Plus, somewhere in the middle, there was an arcade game named Starship 1 that also had an egg.
Code Traps:
https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/06/29/atari-centipedes-hidden...
And the discussion here a month ago about code traps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312256
Along similar lines in both the digital and non-digital world people would include false landmarks and roads on maps to detect copying, since while facts are not protected, fake places are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street