> Probably about 15 people in the end.

Whoa, a much smaller team than I imagined! It must have been fun working in this group!! The rest of the interview is also cool but was impressed with this small number!!

I had to put down too many early 3D action games because of clunky controls and not being able to see what was going on. Maybe horror games (like resident evil) could get away with awkward cameras in the service of jump scares, but it's frustrating when you have to make a jump and the camera, and thus the controls, don't cooperate with you.

> I think that is fine-tuning. Many, many, many hours and days spent actually sitting down and playing the game.

Turns out quality takes time. Who would have thought. Very few games reach this level of fine-tuning, because it takes dedication (and budget).

Funnily, it's almost conflicting with this answer:

> Was much changed during development?

> Apart from the number of polygons use, the characters were first-off – once they were designed, they went straight into the game. There wasn’t really a lot of changing, artists just kept supplying stuff that just got put in the game, conveyor-belt style. That was more or less because of a very, very tight deadline – it had to be out right when the N64 came out.

So it's more nuanced. You fine-tune the fundamentals, but not necessarily everything.

https://youtube.com/channel/UCuvSqzfO_LV_QzHdmEj84SQ

From Wikipedia:

> Starting from 2022, Emanuar would begin uploading videos discussing Nintendo 64 technical details and optimization techniques,[15] along with outlining Super Mario 64's bugs, technical shortcomings and poorly optimized features, fixing them in the process.[16][17][18][19] He would heavily rework the game's source code in 2024 and use it as a base for his collaborative ROM hack Return to Yoshi's Island, which resulted in increased frame rate and improved graphical fidelity compared to the original game, even when running on the original Nintendo 64.