Seems that way; their current "culture" seems to have been to hire a bunch of talent from around the industry, then all sit around eating Texas barbeque while the dev machines gather cobwebs.

People online claim to hate crunch and pretend to march against it but then suck off Naughty Dogs lipstick red rocket. As cool as it was for Nintendo to do this. This article is PR clickbait since so many of these websites turn around and praise AAA shit like the second coming of Jesus that was full of crunch.

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: