Incorrect, at least in DK64’s case.
Donkey Kong 64 was intended to run on the stock N64. There are no features in the game designed to require more than 4MB of RAM. But, they found a game-breaking bug that would crash the system, it seemed to be a memory leak, and they couldn’t identify and fix it. So at great expense they shipped every copy of the game with an Expansion Pak, and then tried to turn lemons into lemonade by playing that up in marketing, “You have to upgrade the system just to play it!”
Compare DK64 to Banjo Kazooie and tell me why one game needs a RAM expansion and the other doesn’t. Compare DK64 to Conker’s Bad Fur Day and tell me which of the two requires twice as much RAM to run.
Majora’s Mask did require the Expansion Pak, not really for higher poly models but to have more entities or enemies on screen at once, to enable longer draw distances, and to allow for frame buffer effects like the blurring and such. It allowed for the frame buffer effects (all the blurring and swirling it does during mask transitions etc.) plus it allowed them to have longer draw distances and more NPCs/enemies on screen at once without resorting to that pre-rendered mounted swivel cam thing they did in Ocarina of Time in Castle Town.
Mark Stevenson, lead artist of DK64, has already said in an interview with Nintendo Life that the use of the Expansion Pak to fix a bug was just a myth. This kind of bug did exist but was fully outside of the context of the Expanion Pak:
That story has become more-or-less accepted fact, although Stevenson believes the truth is more complicated. “This one’s a myth. The decision to use the Expansion Pak happened a long time before the game shipped, in fact we were called in by management and told that we were going to use the Expansion Pak and that we needed to do find ways to do stuff in the game that justified its use and made it a selling point. I think the bug story somehow got amalgamated into the Expansion Pak use and became urban myth.”
“There was a game-breaking bug right at the end of development that we were struggling with,” he clarifies, “but the Expansion Pak wasn’t introduced to deal with this and wasn’t the solution to the problem. My memory is that, like all consoles, the hardware is constantly revised over its lifetime to take advantage of ongoing improvements in technology and manufacture methods to essentially make the manufacture more cost effective and eventually profitable. I think there we’re something like 3 different revisions of the internal hardware by this point and the bug was unique to only one of these versions. We did eventually find it and fix it, but very late in the day.”
Source: Nintendo Life - Feature: Donkey Kong 64 Devs On Bugs, Boxing And 20 Years Of The DK Rap
Stevenson later in an Games Radar Interview explained that the Expansion Pak was used for having bigger maps as well as being able to do more advanced lightning techniques:
Artist Mark Stevenson remembers it being beneficial in terms of standard things like level size in Donkey Kong 64, but there were also more creative uses. “One thing I remember that we did use it for was that we had a lot of dynamic lighting in there, which was hard to do and expensive,” he recalls. “One of the engineers wrote a system whereby you’d go into a cave area, and there’d be a swinging light - the first swing of that light, it’d record all of the colour changes on all of the vertices in that area, and then save it as data and just play it back as an animation rather than going on to calculate the lighting constantly. You’d get a little bit of slowdown when you went in, but after that, it was nice and smooth.”
Source: Retro Gamer - How the N64 “confidently signposted our way into the 3D future”
pre-rendered mounted swivel cam thing they did in Ocarina of Time in Castle Town
Huh. I wondered why that was the only instance where the camera was in the center of the scene. Thanks for sharing.
It isn’t the only instance where it does that; it also happens in several other places like most shops and minigame houses, the barn at Lon Lon Ranch, Dampe’s shack and most house interiors, including Link’s House, the very first location in the game. Castle Town is the largest and most prominent, and you easily spend the most time there, so you notice it there more. Some of the locations I mentioned aren’t required and you might completely miss them, but not Castle Town.
