Ah, "The good old days."(tm)

In theory, anybody could make a successful game. But very few did.
Most of the "indie" developers spent months working alone. They created everything themselves because they had to.
They had dreams of making the next "Ultima", but most couldn't get past the stage of blitting sprites on a static background.
The few that could get something playable finished had little to no chance of convincing a major publisher to look at it. Few self-published games got noticed.

DOOM and Myst were the exception to the rules (the Unreal team was not an indie developer).


I tried being an "indie" developer (a word not used at the time) in the 1990's. I'd much rather be an indie game developer today.