It’s not mythology, testing was crucial so you wouldn’t ship a broken cartridge, which was very costly than a patch download. It made financial sense to test throughly, and more than that, develop carefully.

I think the only guys that made a working game in a week were Atari VCS developers, and IMO it wa a combination of the limited hardware, and the skill of a few legendary programmers.

Today we get games that dwarf the entire software stack of computers decades ago, but they’re made loosely, knowing they’ll ship broken and need patch after patch until it doesn’t make financial sense, and then they’re abandoned.

My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise. For example, a long-standing bug is that once it starts, and offers to press any button to sign in, you have to wait about a minute before doing that, otherwise it will likely hang. This has existed since launch, and after numerous patches it hasn’t been addressed yet.

games back then were also done by dev teams of like a dozen people or two who did literally everything and you had like 1-2 people on each task. localizing games also took like a year or more from their country of origin.

now they are done by teams of hundreds or thousands, esp once you start adding all the middleware and outsourcing of various parts of the game they do now, and they are released internationally in dozens of markets at once.

it's lot easier to find bugs in a game that is 1MB than on that is 256GB