I made far worse things than this in the past for intermediate files (kind of a VM, but in the past we made these to 'obfuscate' dynamic code, not for performan

I made far worse things than this in the past for intermediate files (kind of a VM, but in the past we made these to 'obfuscate' dynamic code, not for performance or other reasons). For instance, we made a lot of software for DOS/Windows used by (most) schools in my country and my uncle, who made the content, was rolling out versions for different subjects quite fast, so I made this intermediate format which came from content with 'tags' (like [IF x<y THEN ...] inside the content) which did not look unlike what is in this article; indeed also representing all text and images are integers. This was done to make it unreadable for the average person who tried. Then, based on the school license key, that file was encrypted (badly) to make it even harder. I suppose there were and are many of these kinds of things going around in save files etc. You just would never predict or hope that people go and reverse engineer it to write directly in it.