Indeed, and I should have said "pseudorandom". What I'm trying to say is that it's fully predictable.

Yes, they could have used rand() with an appropriate srand(seed), communicated between machines. They could even have used a DRBG built with an AES cipher, except it would have been too slow. However, even a bad implementation of rand() usually uses an algorithm which is essentially just "seed = seed * m + a", which is slower than a table lookup.

Anyway - the interesting thing is that a 256 entry table is sufficient for game purposes (not obvious to players), is fast, and makes the synchronous multiplayer setup work.