Nah. Art is approximately zero percent people coming up with their own shit and a huge part of it is always people synthesizing stuff they've seen and experienced before into new shapes. Game design has such a heavy craft element that it's even more true than for other forms like literature or music. There's a tendency, especially with Japanese developers, that involves basically lying about influences -- deciding it's unseemly to refer to other people's work so you just have to pretend you've never seen anything else and even ideas that are visibly and obviously cribbed or adapted from another work just sprung fully from the ether. It's ultimately quite disrespectful to others in the field and makes for completely useless discussion about the process and details of a game's actual design, so I'm all in favorr of Retronauts' tendency to put people on blast for it.
I'm with ya.
Frank Cifaldi in this GDC Talk:
https://youtu.be/HLWY7fCXUwE
Mentions that in creating the Criterion Collection of video games for Mega Man, something is missing from the overall package. Every Criterion disc has multiple commentaries: director, DP, maybe even actors.
He wanted the developer perspective to be reflected in MMLC1. But he says something to the effect of, "Capcom said no and I'm not allowed to say why."
How can journalists and analysts talk about developers' inward gaze when we don't get these stories... ever?
It's changed recently somewhat. See: Jason Schrier's book "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" or "Indie Game the Movie."
But the sadly concluded Iwata Asks is the only thing I can think of that has someone talking to people in this detailed way who worked on retro games that we don't come across often.
When all people today have is access to just the carts and no contact with any human who made the software what other insights can we have other than comparing it to other contemporary works?
I get that devs working on projects right now don't wanna open up for fear of over promising. And I get that game creation is vastly different from books or TV or film... but something feels missing.