The spontaneous melody inspiration is probably because you're exposed to music a lot and could easily recompose using those scales, instrument concepts, etc.
And 60 prototypes sounds a lot like practice to me. I wonder if that person you named (who I, a layman have never heard of) made a few games before they got to where they are. All that practice builds up ammunition for creativity.
The consensus I'm seeing reading these comments is that the article is a lot more useful if you replace "memorization" with "deliberate practice". The first implies little deep understanding but lots of practice. The second implies both.
I think if you've ever been exposed to music your mind could come up with different melodies, and who hasn't been exposed to some sort of music in their life. Even if they were the only human on the planet, they'd probably still encounter songbirds, at least.
I disagree that you have to be exposed to a lot of music to even have a chance at coming up with something. Maybe coming up with something good, sure, but not having that spark of inspiration. People can have flash inspiration for garbage ideas too, it happens all the time in startups :P
That being said, the spark might happen more often the more you practice doing something about it, to your point.
Reiner Knizia is the most prolific board game designer of all time. He has 742 games credited to him on BoardGameGeek (some of those are rethemes of older games of his, but he still has probably at least 500 different games released).
About half of my prototypes are about on the level of cleverness and completeness as the lower rated half of the games he has published, at least, and maybe even a couple might slip into the top half somewhere (at his most brilliant his games are way, way better than mine though). But his name carries a lot of weight so he doesn't struggle to find publishers for a good chunk of the games he comes up with.
Meanwhile I've mostly switched back to video game development because at least that way I can easily publish the game myself when it's ready (game development is super hard in other ways, though). I tried for six years and got one signed board game that still hasn't been released after four years. Meanwhile there was a time where I was releasing 1-2 Flash games a year. If I had just made video game versions of my game prototypes instead I probably could have some basic playable version of it out on a website somewhere.
Although I do still submit some board game designs to unpublished game design competitions (I was a finalist in one of the biggest ones, for a design which still hasn't found a publisher) and go to conventions and set up meetings with publishers when I can afford to do so (I couldn't afford to this year, my spouse took a break from work and our income cut almost in half).
And 60 prototypes sounds a lot like practice to me. I wonder if that person you named (who I, a layman have never heard of) made a few games before they got to where they are. All that practice builds up ammunition for creativity.
The consensus I'm seeing reading these comments is that the article is a lot more useful if you replace "memorization" with "deliberate practice". The first implies little deep understanding but lots of practice. The second implies both.