Strong evidence that Justin Bailey isn't a real password comes from the game state it yields, which is impossible by normal means. Samus has 255 missiles curre

Strong evidence that Justin Bailey isn't a real password comes from the game state it yields, which is impossible by normal means. Samus has 255 missiles current but 205 max, and there are some other inconsistencies like missiles acquired behind doors that remain locked. It's just a wild coincidence that it happens to yield a Samus unarmored and with most of the powerups in the game. Any tales that Justin Bailey was a Nintendo developer or playtester, or anything about the swimsuit, are just fan inventions and retcon (a good deal of which was spread by Nintendo Power itself.) Of course the password must have had some real origin, someone found it sometime. Maybe someone goofing around typed in his own name or a friend's and got really surprised, or some really sharp 6502 hacker puzzled it out as a combination from reading the assembly code. (This was possible in the industry even back in that day, it's how Galoob produced Game Genie codes.) We'll never truly know, as any true claim would get lost in the forest of noise and urban legends. It would actually be pretty trivial nowadays to brute-force search for all combinations of 6-letter words that pass the Metroid password checksum. I recall seeing that online somewhere but can't find it now.