He's correct. Martin Hollis was game director and had worked on one game before, cant remember if he was the only one that had worked on a game before or if they had one more, the rest of the team had never worked on a game. He thought it was one of their strengths as they came up with stuff that seasoned developers would never have tried.

Here's his GDC postmortem presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Fx18cppZk