> we discovered to our surprise that the camera is a critical piece of making sure the physics actually feels like physics

This was my experience when I made Speed Haste, a 3D racing game back in 95. I spent a few nights banging my head against my car physics code, and being frustrated and tired, I switched to tuning camera code to clear my head. Voila! Car physics and handling felt completely different. As you say, audio was huge too, even back in these primitive and (by today's standards) cartoony times.

I've used this anecdote when teaching gamedev students, to hammer in their heads that games are complex because they're the sum of their parts + the sum of all the interactions between all the parts.

(for the historically inclined, code for the game is available at https://github.com/TheJare/SpeedHasteSrc)