I seem to recall seeing a number of examples on filfre.net, and other games like _Prince of Persia_ were largely one-man jobs (he got some help with animation and whatnot, but it was essentially a one-man thing, judging from the famous developer diary). One problem is that people don't always cite exact dollar amounts, and when they do, they don't inflation-adjust - if you made 'only' $300k off a computer game in 1980, well, that's a million dollars now right there.
One example might be Jordan Mechner, who wrote Karateka between the ages of 18 and 20, which went on to sell 500,000 copies. One of his journal entries mentions he got 15% royalty, and one of his videos mentions that the original retail price was $34.95, so he may have made a couple million from it.
Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember. Not sure how much they made but they did evetually parlay the start into millions (at least for Don)
http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/video-games-video-kids-stri...
Re:The making of Dark Castle
by daodedickinson on Friday March 23, 2018 @08:24PM
(#16663862)
Re:The making of Dark Castle
by WillPostForFood on Saturday March 24, 2018 @04:21AM
(#16665487)
Andy Gavin & Jason Rubin who created Naughty Dog started in high school, though the millions may not have come until later.
this post may supply [0] some context
http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
I knew that it was much easier to make a fully formed game as an individual developer back then obviously, but I've never heard of anyone who profited from it like that. I thought independent developers were much better off today with the ability to make a game like "Flappy Bird" and have it distributed and advertised for you by companies like Apple.