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.

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.