Ha, one has to smile at the brazen grasping they came up with to justify their programming oversight. It's like the Sonic 2 manual (or was it 3?) explaining that the glitches that sometimes caused Sonic to get stuck in walls were Robotnik's "traps" to stop Sonic - only a reset could set Sonic free!
I doubt the game, for as simplistic as it was, needed 50+ character passwords either, unless it was specially keeping track of all those giant phallic river monsters you killed.