My favorite tin foil hat theory in videogames is one that I remember reading around 2014-2015 that said one of the reasons Lost Levels was made this way, was because Nintendo received a lot of letters praising the game, and in particular, the level 7-4.

Those letters being supposedly sent by the people who worked on the Commodore, hoping that when the inevitable Mario sequel was out, it would suck and kids would want to stop playing on the NES and give the Commodore 64 a shot.