[vidarh]

Very early 80's maybe, but even a couple of years in most popular games had teams working on them, though not very large ones.

A lot of musicians doing game-music for the Commodore 64, for example, were popular enough in their own right that sometimes publishers would hire them knowing their names would be sufficient to guarantee sales for otherwise mediocre titles. Some of them even perform their 80's game music live today, and there's a whole scene doing remixes of the music.