Not sure about your story, but there was a pretty bad bug in Mario 64 - their flagship game, that degraded performance. If I remember, the fix was a one-line change.
One line change, from a developer that consistently analyzed the decompiled data over the course of years, and with 2020's tooling.
The original devs were in a time crunch in the 90s with the limited experience they had for 3d games. It's possible that they were aware of the bug but said "eh, it's playable" and launched it.
I think you raise the right point. I remember reading about how the team was burned out.
> What was the atmosphere like during the final days of coding?
I think there was a lot of panicking going on. But it was still very organised, there was lots of people working very hard. I think it was quite laid back at the very end, not many bugs, gameplay was sorted out on time. One of the programmers had quite a hard time of it – two of them decided not to make games anymore because of Mario 64. Not because they didn’t enjoy it, but because they’d burnt themselves out.
You're probably thinking of the fact that the game was compiled without optimizations. IIRC Giles Goddard who worked on the game said it was likely intentional in order to minimize any risks for the launch title. Later versions of the game were compiled with optimizations on.
On a related note, Kaze has done a deep dive into optimizing the Super Mario 64 source code for his ROM hacks. Here’s one of his more popular videos on the subject: https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE
The original devs were in a time crunch in the 90s with the limited experience they had for 3d games. It's possible that they were aware of the bug but said "eh, it's playable" and launched it.