Why couldnt someone just reverse engineer the source code? It seems to me conditional jumps would be a good start and maybe work backwards from things that look like auto wins.
I doubt the team had the budget or bytes to obfuscate the bytecode.
Of course if that makes it a hint, then it suggests the sprite right next to it (the guy on the right side of the audience with glasses) is also some kind of clue... does anybody know that one?
The machine code may still be obfuscated, but not for the sake of obfuscation. Cartridge ROM space was tight, so you end up with lots of tricks (like overlapping graphics and code) in some NES games to save space. That's not to mention the scarcity of clock cycles and RAM.
There's nothing wrong with that idea, conceptually. Practically speaking, it's just a bigger pain in the butt than you might think. You've got as many as a couple thousand individual, numbered variables to look for patterns in, controlled by a few 10's of thousands of instructions. It's quite possible to do; it just takes someone with Nintendo/6502 programming experience, an eye for patterns, and a ton of time :-)
For all we know the code isn't explicitly tied together, so you'd have to find two things going off (probably) the same condition, and they even then might be going off two different (yet related) conditions that are non-obvious just looking at the code.
Just because the two things sync up doesn't mean the code makes that obvious.
The real question is why would someone reverse engineer the source code for no reason? You would have to know what you are looking for before you started.
I doubt the team had the budget or bytes to obfuscate the bytecode.