Go back even farther and you'll get to a point where entire games were written in assembly and assets might been written with a hex editor (and even that description might be higher level than what they actually did).

My dad had a computer class in high school that involved filling in ordered punch cards and then they'd send them off to a university to run them on their mainframe and they'd send the output punch cards back. That wouldn't have even been assembly, it would have been machine code, though they probably marked the punch cards to be easier to remember what bits meant what. But it would take like a week to find out there was a mistake in the code.

Sounds crazy from where we are today, but that's all they had at the time. If you wanted to do something awesome, you could either give up, invent a better way, or just buckle down and do it the hard way.

I bring this up when people talk about how "hard" game development is.

20 years ago, games were being made in 12 months, by 30 people, with tools that people today would consider to be unreasonably slow, with even less detail than they would consider acceptable. Getting a workable prototype could easily take months, and storage space was severely limited. Practically every studio had to write their own.game engine.

Under all those restrictions, we got the greatest video games of all time.

Nowadays, its not uncommon for game studios to have over 500 people. Tools are extremely user friendly and fast. Game engines are already ready made, to be used for free. Someone could make art assets with 10x the detail than before in less than a 5th of the time. There is basically no storage limit. Getting a workable prototype takes weeks, if that.

And for all that? Games take 6 years, and release as buggy unfinished messes. The budget is bloated by marketing costs and too many people on payroll. How many games under these conditions will go on to be among the greats of the 90s-10s? Not enough.

Game development is easy.

God, the RE1 remake is amazing

Why is this one here twice?

If something is 40 times smaller than another thing, what is the reference point for how small the original thing is?