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I would argue that game devs are worse than ever, even the auteurs.
By way of comparison, I was listening to a podcast Dan Carlin did, talking to some boxing historian. And they mused over the fact that most athletes today are better than they ever were. I mean, just look at the records for any particular sport.
And then there is boxing. Boxers of old had a much higher pace of fights, as well as much more polished defensive capabilities because they didn't want to risk injury and losing their meal ticket. While a champion today might have 20 fights, a champion back in "the day" might have 200. Compare anyone who has competed in 200 events versus 20, and who is superior is usually obvious.
If you don't buy that argument, there is always the story of The Beetles, and how they played tens of thousands of hours of gigs before they emerged as The Beetles and went down in history.
Game devs these days might ship 2 games in 10 years. In the 90's it could be as much as 10 or 20. Look back at id software's pre-Wolfenstein days for Softdisk for instance. For a good chunk of the 80's and 90's, if you weren't on a yearly release schedule or higher, you were struggling. It wasn't until the late 90's that id software and Blizzard took on a "when it's done" attitude, but even that might be 2 or 3 years tops. Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
On the plus side, bugs actually get noticed and fixed now. We don't usually get deus ex style "hey we broke a bunch of maps, all the plasma weapons, and some random character interactions, have fun dealing with that for the next 25 years. Dev's out"
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I would suspect that boxers and musicians of today lack something that old-time pugilists and rockstars had: chemical enhancement to aid that greater grind.
Games specifically take longer because they're often scoped bigger, are more complex, and the technology that builds them is more complex. In a few hours, one could crank out a barebones Mario-style platformer in 2D. Making that same game into a Metroidvania-style game would take an order of magnitude more time (let's say weeks). Make it 3D, and the time horizon for development extends to months at the minimum.
id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.
Games can be made in short timeframes like the old days, but you will notice the difference that lack of extra time makes. Go look at any game jam on Itch and play a few submissions, they're often very barebones, sometimes obviously crude, and typically quite short on content.
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Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?
I do think there is something to be said for raw numbers of fights. A similar thing happened in baseball where basically every record based on sheer volume has some unbreakable record from 1910 when pitchers pitched complete games every day. This is undoubtedly largely a result of player pay, if your pitcher has a 300 million dollar contract you are going to treat him like a priceless artifact and handle him incredibly gently, you're never really going to want to push him to the absolute breaking point. When contracts were at most a few hundred thousand a year, yea you can ride him like freaking Secretariat until his UCL turns to dust. So I think there is some truth to the idea that the most resilient players today are probably being held back from achieving their true potential out of fear of injury. Nolan Ryan definitively shows that some humans are capable of throwing at modern speeds for a vastly higher volume of games than pitchers today ever approach.
And lets lump @HalloweenSnarry in with this too
My point in bringing up id software's Softdisk days, or Westwood's workmanlike porting jobs, or Bullfrog's start writing business software or ports, is not that these were obviously geniuses from the jump, who've godlike talent was plain as day in everything they did. It's to point out you don't get good at anything working on a single project for 10 years. You need to crank out 10-20 workman like finished projects before you make your first Doom, or your first Command & Conquer. I'm not harping on the notion that the programming was better (though I think it was), or that the games had better core gameplay loops (though I think they do). I'm pointing out that these game developers racked up feedback on their products at a much faster pace than game devs today who slave away on a single mediocre arena shooter for Sony for 10 years straight.
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