How many people are on a development team, like say with a big company like Nintendo or Cacpcom?

The 'Post Mortems' on Gamasutra normally state the number of developers on a project.
Westwood list 25 full-time and 16 part-time for Tiberian Sun.
Rise Of Nations 26 and 16 and took 3 years.
Dungeon Siege 27 and 5 and took 3years 8 months.
AOE II 40 total.
Not sure if different genres have different numbers

EA and Ubi are running teams of 70 to 150 people on major titles.

you could always check out the credits of a game too :)

Quote: Original post by krez
you could always check out the credits of a game too :)

Good luck with that - you'd have to go through the list several times as credits are often categorised and many names occur several times. IMHO Gamasutra's post-mortems are more convinient.

Yeah, I tried looking at credits, but many people's names come up more that once, as already stated. Also, I don't know if they give credit to everyone. For example, the ending credits for super mario bros. had literally likee about 10 people (with shigeru showing up twice). So I don't know.

Its an older game. More recent ones have more people, but back then nine people could make a game. That can't happen now that people demand better graphics, and better AI, and better physics, and a better story.

a lot of the bigger games, like at EA, run peak team sizes of about 150-200 during the final 5-6 months of the project.

-me

Quote: Its an older game. More recent ones have more people, but back then nine people could make a game. That can't happen now that people demand better graphics, and better AI, and better physics, and a better story.

Heh, yeah I should have made a note of that. A game like Zelda: Ocarina of Time had the credits listed (though I don't know if they left people out) and there were about 30 people. Of course, they did work on it for 5 years.