It wasn't just the method he used, though. It was 512 pages of assembly, and he spent more than 6 months studying it. The amount of effort he put in is astounding.
It sounds a lot when put like that, but it's not 512 pages of dense text, but in terms of typical presentation, perhaps four hex character address, a three character instruction and an operand of <10 characters or so - he could've fit the entire thing on 64 double sided pages easily, maybe less.
Lots of people printed out games and other programs in the 32K-64K size range all the time and studied them for months. It's what we did to work with "large" code bases. I've written perhaps a dozen pretty printing programs for asm (including ones that would painstakingly download narrower fonts to our dot matrix printer to fit more columns....) exactly because I wore out large number of printer cartridges, printing out code and kept trying to get things printed faster and on less paper, and that was a pretty common pursuit.
Again, it's a lot of effort, and some of what he did shows a quite impressive level of dedication (such as dumping the eproms, building his own clone of the game, and fixing bugs the designers hadn't found), but actually printing out a code base that size and studying it to learn was quite normal.
I'm all for recognizing this guys effort, but not for the most mundane part of what he did.
.. and used it as a general work-buffer for expressing routines and dumping assembly .. my parents called it my "bogroll homework" since I usually took rolls of plotted product to the head with me, light reading ..
