Id started out as a shareware outfit which was the indie of it's day, instead of marketing games through app stores they distributed demos on floppy disk through intermediaries who advertised in the back of computing magazines and encouraged people to share demo versions by copying the disks with their friends. They used the shareware model for every game they released up until Doom 2. The original doom had a full 1/3 of the game available for free. I don't think early id games like Commander keen were even available in retail stores until much later.
Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games, where live movie footage was mixed into gameplay. Night Trap and Rebel Assault are early examples of this.
The problem they had was that there was too jarring a difference in realism between game sprites and movie footage.
> Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games
Not just that - fancy animated cut scenes for intros and finales like in Dune 2 (1992) for PC. For a game that was maybe 10 MB on disk, those short animations were about 10 - 20% of the total installed size.
In any case, a team of ten people over the course of a year is typical for the time. The whole CONCEPT of a megabudget game with a hundred people solely dedicated to art and design for several years is something I've first associated with Final Fantasy VII.
The term "AAA" for me has implications of "Three million copies sold and we didn't even make back our IT budget".
Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games, where live movie footage was mixed into gameplay. Night Trap and Rebel Assault are early examples of this. The problem they had was that there was too jarring a difference in realism between game sprites and movie footage.