Yeah i remember reading something similar about a DOS game where the game was crashing when you exited and the developers hexedited the DOS extender to replace the crash message from 'Protection fault at blah' (or something like that) to 'Thank you for playing the game' (or something like that) :-P.

It seems it was a common solution to the external crash testing performed by publishers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bkKw32dGw