Were major professional video games really made this "organically"? [closed]

I always thought that Shigeru Miyamoto sat down and made a very detailed "plan" before they ever started programming and making assets for the game to actually construct it. And that this was how it was done in general for video games.

But then I realized that two of my favouritest games in the whole wide world, DOOM (1993) and Ocarina of Time (1998) had extremely "sketchy" beta/alpha versions.

DOOM was an extremely different game in every version up to the final (first shareware) version. I've played them myself.

Ocarina's alpha/beta footage, and leaked ROMs, show extreme differences in how areas looked then and in the final version of the game.

How is this possible? Did they not follow the original ideas? It seems like such a waste to create a whole 3D area which is just some sort of "placeholder" and then later "flesh it out". I mean, these aren't freeware hobbyist games made by one guy in his bedroom, working on it for 10 years and released (if ever) "when it's done".

I don't understand how it's possible, especially not for such a intricate masterpiece such as Ocarina. The in-development 3D environments look nothing like the finished ones, so they clearly did not have very clear instructions when they first made them. How can that be? Were these specific games extreme exceptions?

zelda-ocarina-of-time doom

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Do video games rot your brain?

While there are some ways a brain can literally rot or turn to slime, watching video games or television isn't one of them.

When did the video game industry explode?

1980s. The video games industry experienced its first major growing pains in the early 1980s; the lure of the market brought many companies with little experience to try to capitalize on video games, and contributors towards the industry's crash in 1983, decimating the North American market.

What was the first big video game company?

In 1972, Atari (founded by Nolan Bushnell, the godfather of gaming) became the first gaming company to really set the benchmark for a large-scale gaming community.

When did video games become a problem?

Following the release of the first commercial video games in the early 1970s, it took until the 1980s for the first reports of video game addiction to appear in the psychological and psychiatric literature.

The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why.

Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Images: Caleb Oquendo, Erik Mclean, Wallace Chuck, Ricardo Esquivel