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It's interesting to see per the comment section of that YouTube video Mario 64 had only 7 programmers working for 621 days. Obviously very small by today's standards.

I'm a little surprised that development costs and team size keep going up in the game industry.

While games are certainly more complicated, it's a little surprising to me the tooling hasn't scaled to compensate for the complexity.

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This is very surprising to me as well. As someone who does solo game dev in Unity I'm often surprised by how long it takes _me_ to get stuff done. I doubt its just friction from the tools I use, back then they basically just had a compiler, debugger, and a devkit! I feel like there's something we're missing nowadays.

A lot of older games had very few programmers and most of which had custom and/or reused engines from previous games.

It goes to show you _can_ do a while lot on your own or with a small team when you're focused on the game itself.

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