I did the same for a snake game for the TI-83. I didn't think of it as a clever hack so much as it was inexperience; I figured it's how games normally worked. System dialogues like "your battery is low" suddenly became parts of the playing field which was funny if nothing else. My code was slow enough that I didn't need any sleeps or busy loops, maxing out the CPU with my inefficient code just turned out to be the right playable speed which didn't occur to me as a coincidence until much later

Reminds me of a similar story of someone creating a Tron lightcycle game on an Apple IIgs. They had created a bug so that the lightcycle could travel off-screen and into memory, causing all sorts of undefined behaviour.

https://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-an-...