You don't think they'd be able to tell if they didn't mis-time the jump and still didn't get the super jump?
As a matter of fact, no, I don't. I think you really need to try hard to go back in time to 1981 - 1982. Widespread, mass-produced, popular video games have only EXISTED for less than 5 years (history buffs are going to disagree with that but I don't care). Things were changing RAPIDLY and nobody really knew much about anything. Plus, most people, and certainly the people that would be working at a software company absolutely did not have the skills at video game playing that this community assumes that "everybody" has. It is very likely that they felt that pressing the button once within a specific 9-frame window was enough of a challenge that you wouldn't really be sure if you were timing it correctly and if it didn't work during a test, they probably assumed that they simply "missed it" -- which was probably great in their eyes . . . they were trying to create something somewhat challenging that would take some skill and that a lot of people would at least occasionally miss -- ESPECIALLY if they were BRAND NEW to the game -- which all testers were by default.
The fact that it "sometimes" worked, and they were happy with the animation and the resulting object locations in both cases -- was probably good news to everyone and they just assumed it was working probably. They probably didn't realize that it just wasn't working as often as it should have. For example, if they expected people to be able to execute it properly 80% of the time and the testers were only getting it to work 40% of the time, they probably just didn't put two and two together -- they simply thought that if they had "right timing" that it worked, and then they moved on.
I am wondering that if it was an unintended bug that made the game more difficult why hey didn't correct it when they released the easier romset.
I'm not very familiar with the timeline of how later releases like this were developed (was the easy romset developed by Nintendo or is it a hack? Usually the company would INCREASE difficulty to help their arcade operators earn more quarters). But, it's my understanding that a lot of these software updates that were offered to the arcade operators were ready for distribution on the order of months (and NOT years or decades) after the original game was released. The point that I'm getting at is that they very likely WERE NOT AWARE OF THIS BUG at the time since it sometimes worked.
Anyways, I hope I'm explaining my reasoning well enough in this thread. In my own mind, this whole issue is amazingly clear to me and I'm actually pretty flabbergasted that more people (ESPECIALLY the programmers in our community) don't see it the same way. Honestly, to me this is such a "DUH" kind of conversation that this whole thread feels like a wierd Twilight Zone episode.
Of course, none of this means that I'm right. I may very well be wrong . . . but I doubt it! ;-)
