[mattnewport]

Back in the era where this was somewhat common on games it only had to work once. In those days you burned a master for a console game and once it shipped that game was done. There were no zero day patches (or any other kind of patches) and no updates to the game once it shipped.

Often it would be the lead programmer on the game who put this array in and it wouldn't necessarily be known about by everyone. It wouldn't have worked well if people were constantly grabbing bits of memory from it during development. It worked because it was a 'secret' and its use was reserved for shipping.