> Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did
I just read "Masters of Doom", and this struck me as wrong. People tend to only remember Carmack and Romero, but Doom had a team about as big as Super Mario World, another AAA-gamechanger. So I looked it up.
15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.
The crediting of Super Meat Boy is more complex. If you exclude the guest artists who did one-off pieces, then the original Windows version comes in at 7 people. This balloons to 48 when you include the guest art, XBox port staff, and localization staff.
> 15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.
While Super Meat Boy was mainly made by (AFAIK) two people, the original DOOM was made by an id software that had just 10 employees - this is mentioned in the Doom 3 manual. But this also includes everyone on id, in an article about Quake some months ago Romero mentioned that "We got Doom done mostly with only five people, and then we got a sixth person during the last few months. With Quake, there were only nine of us, but by that time everyone on the team was awesome".
However it isn't just the number of people but also how long it took to make the game. Doom was made in less than a year (or about a year if you include the engine research that went into Shadowcaster) but Super Meat Boy was made in a bit less than two years (and that was with already having Meat Boy as a template).
I just read "Masters of Doom", and this struck me as wrong. People tend to only remember Carmack and Romero, but Doom had a team about as big as Super Mario World, another AAA-gamechanger. So I looked it up.
15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.
The crediting of Super Meat Boy is more complex. If you exclude the guest artists who did one-off pieces, then the original Windows version comes in at 7 people. This balloons to 48 when you include the guest art, XBox port staff, and localization staff.
All numbers from MobyGames.