Still, it's amazing. Ridiculously impractical like those who build ship models in bottles, but awesome nonetheless. Hopefully it'll also be inspirational starting-off point for those wanting to learn more about how computers work. I know many who started down the road to CS with this sort of "game hacking".
Relatedly, I also know of an instructor who does something somewhat similar for the first class of his "intro to computing" course: he takes out a little 8-bit computer mounted on a breadboard with a few LEDs and pushbuttons, and enters a few dozen machine instructions bit-by-bit, writing a short program that causes the LEDs to flash in various patterns selected by the buttons. As part of that demo, he also writes and runs a "Hello World" binary in Windows Notepad --- entering each byte as ASCII characters. He says it's these sorts of "unusual" demos that can most effectively get students' attention, and I agree.