As you go back in time, the number of people working on a game drops dramatically. Crash Bandicoot was released in 1996 and had 2 programmers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot_(video_game)

Three years earlier, Doom was released. It had 4 programmers.

Six years before that, Final Fantasy had 1 programmer.

If you stick around for the credits in a modern video game*, it's clear hundreds of people are involved.

Unless you look at the Indies.

Of course. I think the idea of the 2-3 person indie team or even solo developer is quite romantic. For instance: http://jere.in/sneaking-into-rohrers-castle-part-1

With that last comment though, I was mainly referencing AAA games (e.g. Bioshock Infinite).

Thanks. You might have just stolen all my freetime.

Ha! You mean TCD? It is pretty addictive, but the crazy part is I couldn't convince hardly any of my friends to play. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. I'm pretty active on the forums if you have any questions.

Reminds me to get back into Frozen Synapse. (Though I did manage to get friends to play.) Frozen Synapse is probably the perfect execution of the idea "`UFO: Enemy Unknown' tactical battles in multiplayer".

I've beaten FF many times before and have seen the early credits screen...but I would've never guessed that just a single programmer was behind it:

http://squarecave.blogspot.com/2012/06/nasir-gebelli-program...

> Although Final Fantasy is one of the most popular video games on the NES, programming an RPG proved somewhat difficult for Nasir. According to Sakaguchi, "it was the first time he had programmed anything like an RPG". Gebelli did not fully understand what an RPG was and how the battle system for such a game should work. I believe that Final Fantasy may have suffered from so many bugs and glitches due to Gebelli's understanding of RPGs. Nevertheless, Final Fantasy is still a fantastic game and Gebelli did not cease to amaze. Players were in awe at the battle system that Nasir programmed; being able to use four characters at once, the turn-based combat, and especially the spells and their glorious 8-bit animations.

I don't remember there being "so many bugs" in FF. As far as I remember, it was the only released-in-America FF to have any real challenge.

The bugs I know of boiled down to abilities that either did nothing, or worked far less often than they were supposed to. It's quite possible to beat the game while not consciously noticing the bugs (although you might just not cast certain spells that seem to never work not knowing that they actually never worked)

What I usually see in the credits for AAA video games is a handful of programmers - 5 - 10 - for the game itself, a bunch more for the engine - if they are credited at all. Most 'programming' done in video games is actually scripting, i.e. player touches button, door opens.

Well, they were writing in Lisp ;).

That was my thought too. For a studio that was so important to Sony that a hardware engineer investigated a "hardware" bug just to make a software engineer happy, I would assume they would have a larger team.

Also, having played the game - wow, two engineers.

Well they made it in Lisp. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban...

There would be a lot more artists.