Comment by a1o
13 hours ago
> How many people were on the Super Mario 64 team?
> Probably about 15 people in the end.
Whoa, a much smaller team than I imagined! It must have been fun working in this group!! The rest of the interview is also cool but was impressed with this small number!!
It's incredible how small the teams were on some of Nintendo's best games.
Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask were 40-50 people. If you look at the credits for modern games, they scroll for minutes at light speed. The entire credits are ~100 people on those games.
Some of that inflation is because localizing games takes more people now. Back in the day it might have been one person per language for 2-10 languages translating text only. Now you might also need a full cast of voice actors for each language + writers and directors for each language, over a wider number of languages.
Some of that is the standard for bugs has changed. Games do still ship with bugs but back in the day the standard was just "be playable to the end and don't crash" Now there's a complex certification process to validate the game's behavior against the system's host OS, and if the game has online features you have to test against cheating and exploits. Check out some of the bugs that speedrunners exploit in older games that let them manipulate the contents of memory, that would be considered insane today. So you need a lot more QA staff than back in the day.
It seems these days AAA games are blockbuster movie level production
Compared to today's big-budget productions, I'm also impressed by this era's typical development team size. Banjo Kazooie, another iconic N64 platformer, was another 15 member dev team, the bulk being 4(!) programmers and 4 artists.
One thing I find really interesting is how the move from industrial society to information society involved such small teams for new products. Look at the huge teams needed to make a new ship design or airplane or even things like washers and dryers and such. Its a lot of different roles. Some of these projects had hundreds if not thousands of people involved.
Meanwhile, some of our most amazing software came from groups under 150 people. The original Macintosh was just 125 people. The NES was a core team of 4 to 5 engineers. The original iPhone team was 200 people. The original Amiga team was 30 people. Windows 1.0 started with 13 people. Windows NT started with 12 people. Microsoft Excel was originally 5-7 people. Google launched with six people and its 1999 staffing level was around 40 people. Some classic video games from the 80s were made by 2 or 3 people, often just 1 person. A lot of 90s games had teams of 5-30 people.
You could drive past a sleepy office park with a tiny office and inside would be 50 people who would change our software world significantly. I find that really interesting and romanticized a bit.
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