Dev Team size and time to produce a game

[Blackjack]

I know (or think I do) that most 2600 games were developed completely by a single person, but about how long did an average game take to make?

 

And..........

 

 

How many people/how long did it usually take to make a game for:

NES

SNES

 

 

 

I know that these will vary widely, I would just like a general average.

[Lord Helmet]

One of the guys in Once Upon Atari says that management expected you to have a game nearly done in about 6 months IIRC.

[Blackjack]

... And I wonder.... is it easier to program an Atari game now than it was back then. Are there dev tools that make the job easier(for those of you with the talent)?

[danwinslow]

Absolutely.

[LanDi]

I know (or think I do) that most 2600 games were developed completely by a single person, but about how long did an average game take to make?

 

And..........

 

 

How many people/how long did it usually take to make a game for:

NES

SNES

 

 

 

I know that these will vary widely, I would just like a general average.

999402[/snapback]

 

Well it depends massively on the project and the skills of the people involved. How big is a project going to be and how varied. Code can be written fairly quickly, piecing it together can take ages. If you take the infamous ET on the 2600 it was actually coded in two weeks. The SNES would take longer than the NES obviously, I reckon a team of six could knock something out in around six months, but again it depends what the software is doing and how complex the code is.

[Blackjack]

So you'd say a general avg. team/time on snes was 6devs/6months? I know it's bad to generalize like that. I'm just curious about the man-hours involved here ,mostly in a historical perspective, but I'm also interested to learn that programming now is easier and less time consuming than it was back then.

Edited January 15, 2006 by Blackjack

[Pixelboy]

So you'd say a general avg. team/time on snes was 6devs/6months? I know it's bad to generalize like that. I'm just curious about the man-hours involved here ,mostly in a historical perspective, but I'm also interested to learn that programming now is easier and less time consuming than it was back then.

1000472[/snapback]

Easier? Sure, because of today's tools that are at everyone's disposal, but is it really less time-consuming? Personally, I don't think so. Anyone who's into game programming has to go through some kind of learning curve, and you simply can't go around the fact that, no matter what hardware you make your games on, it takes years to gain enough experience to really master the art of making good games and taking full advantage of the hardware.

 

A single guy in his basement can do wonders with such systems as the Atari 2600, the ColecoVision and all the similar hardware from the eighties, but as soon as you enter the NES and post-NES era, you'll find you can't make something you can be really proud of without involving a team of people to help you with the graphics, music, testing and everything else. And the more people you involve in your project, the more complex it becomes, and the longer it takes to reach completion, if it ever reaches that point at all.

 

So to answer your question in a general fashion, I would say that making games for the old classic consoles required between one and five persons working full time, often for several months, and the games changed a lot between the initial drafts and the finished products, mostly to cope with hardware limitations. For later machines like the NES, the teams often went up to dozens of people associated (partially or full time) to each project, depending on the project scope.

 

The number of involved people has increased over the years, and today it's not uncommon to have hundreds of people pitching into a single game, each employee performing specific and specialized tasks. Long gone are the days of the lone programmer making commercial games on his personal computer, but for those who feel nostalgia for those days, there's always the homebrew dev scene, which is kept very healthy thanks to the internet.

[Blackjack]

Thank You