> I feel like the most obvious answer is that a developer wanted a personal backdoor for playing pirated games. My bet would be that it was left in to be more

> I feel like the most obvious answer is that a developer wanted a personal backdoor for playing pirated games. My bet would be that it was left in to be more of a “private party trick” than a real means of piracy. Alien Resurrection came pretty late in the PS1 life cycle, by which time it was much cheaper to get a mod chip fitted to the console then it would be to purchase the game at retail (Even the stealth chips with much better mimicked the correct expected behavior which bypassed in game copy protection checks), and would boot the pirated game much quicker then using this method. But I guess it could have been a "Well if everything else fails, I'll still have this one weird trick up my sleeve", a method of last resort if Sony managed to pull a rabbit out of their hat in the later revisions of the console, but one that was never needed.