What I wouldn't give to attend that 90's PlayStation R&D internal intro programming course.
Super impressive!
I personally believe that we are in the golden age right now: literally anyone can pickup and make games. Game dev is actually something you can learn on your own and do.
Back in the 90s it was all locked up in licenses, expensive books or a handful of companies.
Now you can open up Unity and make a game in a weekend.
Most published commercial games were made by a single 14 to 20 year old in few months.
The sheer amount of games made by under 20s is definitely higher today than back then, and I'd argue the quality of it too.
This isn't really true. Yes, some games were made hastily like that, like E.T. for Atari.
Just one cherry-picked example, The Legend of Zelda for NES was made in about 2 years with 9 people in the credits.
Some popular modern indie games with similar team sizes and development schedules include:
Valheim, which went from full time development in 2018 to early access release in 2021 with a team of two.
Stardew Valley's initial development (not an early access game) took four years with a single developer.
Rimworld took one year for an alpha build, and about 5 more years to full release with 2-3 developers.
Minecraft/Infiniminer took about 2 years to reach a release version, with Notch handing off development to Jeb and Mojang only growing to a larger development team post-Microsoft acquisition.
Sure it's nice to just be able to "import antigravity" as one does with massive, convenient, prebaked infrastructure like Unity, but it's never worth the cost, when the cost always seems to be "everything you've got, and a little more next year".
People who grew up making their first games in BASIC didn't really know or care of the implications of using it, which required DOS. It was the ease of picking it up and make something fun quickly.
Unity might not be perfect but allows anyone to put their first "black rectangle" in seconds, on many various platforms without a thought.
When I started, it was OpenGL/DX C++ madness full of magical incantation which would call graphic APIs just because someone said so and without much support for non-English speakers.