It was pretty clear even from watching the end credits of Metroid Prime 1 that the crunch was insane. I have never seen so many employees thank their families for tolerating the insane OT in personal messages on a single credits reel. I had always thought that Miyamoto was the slave driver that created these conditions but it sounds like from the article that the stress was self-inflicted from within Retro Studios. It makes me happy to hear that Nintendo actually improved the situation afterwards.
Unfortunately, this does make Metroid Prime into a rare example of where an extreme stress environment produced amazing artistic results. MP1 is to this day probably still in my top 5 games of all time. The game design was absolutely masterful and pioneered some really unique mechanics that made the first person platformer viable. IGN did a really great video chat on the first Metroid Prime back in 2012 that talked about a lot of the incredible innovation that MP1 had as well as a lot of behind the scenes information on its development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=61WebVyYg0Y&feature=emb_logo
Apparently 343 Studios scooped up most of Retro's talent for Halo 4 which is why the opening level of the two games is so similar:
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