I heard the same thing from Andrew Davie of BEAM Software (Melbourne House), who developed Super Glove Ball. Since Nintendo refused to provide the company with any meaningful documentation, they had to come up with various hacks for framerate calculation or something similar.

When they were trying to get approval for Nintendo for some game, it turned out that one specific version of the USA NES wouldn't work, or the game was making the system overheat (I don't remember exactly). Andrew told me that they had to fly all the way to the Nintendo's HQ to deal with this since they were on a tight window to release. It also turned out that there were fewer than a hundred of that specific version of the NES in circulation.

Ah, it was a bit different. I found the note in my (unpublished) book:

  Tests for games were not exclusive to gameplay either. Games had to be tested in each possible NES console they would be played on. Beam Software’s Andrew Davie recalls flying to Nintendo’s offices in Washington, in response to the game “The Three Stooges” causing problems on a NES system that they were testing it on. He recalls there being “something like 23 variations of the machine, with different chip manufacturers, etc.” that the game had to be tested on to pass Nintendo’s tests. Once the problem was diagnosed (the way Davie had programmed the game, due to the lack of official documentation, made the NES run too hot, which caused flickering sprites throughout the game; instead of writing the sprite data into RAM as the official documentation called for, Davie wrote the data every two seconds), the game was fixed and accepted for release; after this, the problematic NES console was removed from Nintendo’s testing line-up, with Davie being told that only around 5 consoles with that combination of chips was in circulation in the entire USA.