Mario 64 Wastes So Much Memory

This is very surprising to me as well. As someone who does solo game dev in Unity I'm often surprised by how long it takes _me_ to get stuff done. I doubt its just friction from the tools I use, back then they basically just had a compiler, debugger, and a devkit! I feel like there's something we're missing nowadays.

A lot of older games had very few programmers and most of which had custom and/or reused engines from previous games.

It goes to show you _can_ do a while lot on your own or with a small team when you're focused on the game itself.