Making your own fun

I'm starting to think I want an Assassin's Creed game that's mainly about lighting braziers and burning away cobwebs with a torch. It's a compulsion.

You may think you're making your own fun but like five people at Ubisoft spent weeks of their lives getting those animations just right to make them maximally satisfying. Some dude missed his daughter's first birthday just carefully tweaking the light sourcing on them.

There are many times more man-hours spent creating little details like that in modern games than were spent designing and programming entire Atari 2600 games from scratch. I would bet that if you include engine development and playtesting etc... that one detail took 10 times longer to create than the entirety of the game Megamania, which is actually a pretty good game!