I'm sure they could have figured it out if it was important enough. They just decided it was not worth it and scrapped the product instead. "we couldn’t afford

I'm sure they could have figured it out if it was important enough. They just decided it was not worth it and scrapped the product instead. "we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying..." So the estimated time to fix the bug was on the scale of days. It would certainly have taken longer to rewrite the game from scratch if that was the alternative.