The Nintendo 64, released in 1996, was the last home video game console to use cartridges until Nintendo brought them back in 2017 for the Switch. That may not be all that surprising, but the reasons behind the switch from cartridges to CDs are many and important.

RELATED: Ranking Every Nintendo 64 Console Based On Rarity And Value

The rise of PlayStation and Nintendo losing their place at the top of the food chain with the Nintendo 64 left a huge mark on the industry. And a lot of that has to do with Nintendo’s cartridge system. But there are a lot more wild facts about Nintendo’s so-called “Game Pak” system than that.

10 Cartridges Are More Expensive than CDs

N64 cartridges with money in the background

Because a CD is just a piece of plastic with data essentially printed on it (and are a lot smaller than cartridges), they’re cheap to mass-produce. In contrast, Nintendo’s cartridges were expensive. Each cartridge required a set of chips, a breadboard to put those chips on, wires, pins, a bulky plastic housing, and a printed label.

How much more expensive were they? A 1996 edition of Next Generation Magazine reported that PS1 CDs cost just $1 each, whereas Nintendo 64’s cartridges cost $30. This cost was passed on to the consumer, which explains why Nintendo 64 versions of multi-platform games were always more expensive.

9 Cartridges Are Faster, Though

PS1 with Crash Bandicoot loading on top

The biggest advantage cartridges have over CDs, and why Nintendo went with them over discs, is that they read data significantly faster. The original PlayStation had a 2x drive that read data at 300 kilobytes per second. Carts have the ability to read data instantaneously, meaning load times are minimal, sometimes even non-existent.

RELATED: The First Games Released On The N64 (In Chronological Order)

In 1996, leading up to the Nintendo 64’s launch, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi reaffirmed Nintendo’s commitment’s to the cartridge, telling Billboard Magazine: “Many of you feel that CD-ROM is the call of the day, but look at the latest buzzword in the computer world — plug-and-play — which is nothing but [Nintendo] culture. Having no loading time is a great advantage.”

8 Their Low Data Storage Changed How Games Were Made

Nintendo 64 Cartridges Faster than CDs

While game carts may load games faster than CDs, they offer at least one massive disadvantage: they cannot hold nearly as much data. Nintendo 64’s Game Paks held only one-tenth of the data a PS1 CD could hold. This means that while using multiple Game Paks could theoretically be an option, it would take so many of them to match the content of a CD it’d be prohibitively expensive, to say nothing of physical storage limitations.

As a result, games made for PS1 and PC that used CDs and DVDs had to be redesigned – sometimes dramatically – to work on the Nintendo 64. Voice acting and other sound effects would be removed, CG cutscenes replaced with in-game models and static images, and sometimes even whole levels would be removed from games.

7 They Ruined Nintendo’s Relationship with Square

Cloud and characters on train in Final Fantasy 7

Square Soft (today known as Square Enix) infamously hated the idea of Nintendo sticking with cartridges. They didn’t like the size limitations or the price to manufacture the Game Paks. Citing these drawbacks, Square began making games exclusively for the Sony PlayStation.

Years later, Square Vice President and Final Fantasy 7 Producer Hironobu Sakaguchi talked about the company’s decision to jump ship. “If you wanted to make a 3D action game on a Nintendo 64 cartridge with that limited space, you could do it. But I wanted to create a 3D role-playing game. It was very clear in my head what I wanted to make, but that would have been difficult on Nintendo’s hardware. [...] Based on our calculations there was no way it could all fit on a ROM cartridge.”

6 Stop ‘n’ Swop Never Started

Nintendo 64 Stop N Swop

Stop ‘n’ Swop was a unique idea by Banjo-Kazooie developer Rare that would only be possible thanks to the Game Pak. To summarize, the Nintendo 64 loads data from the cart into internal RAM and stores it for ten seconds. Players who owned both Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie would be able to load up the first game, quickly pull out the cart, and put in the sequel to get secret items.

RELATED: Banjo-Kazooie: The Best Levels In The Game

The system was never implemented for several reasons. Nintendo feared players would damage their cartridges, or the system itself, trying to quickly pull out the game and put in a new one. It was also unreliable and required an original model Nintendo 64 to work at all.

5 Counterfeit Carts Are Rampant Today

Nintendo 64 Counterfeit Carts side by side

One advantage cartridges had over CDs was that they were harder for pirates to crack. Anyone could theoretically copy a CD and produce a bunch to pass around. But cartridges required special equipment to read, copy, and reproduce. While this stopped pirates back then, these days, Nintendo 64 piracy has become a major problem for retro collectors.

Fake Nintendo 64 Game Paks are flooding the market. Sometimes a fake is easy to spot, obvious flaws in a counterfeit cartridge’s molding or sticker being dead giveaways. But sometimes a fake is so good it can fool even the most die-hard collector.

4 Nintendo Sold Their Own Fake Cartridges For Cleaning

Nintendo 64 Cleaning Kit box

Tired of blowing into the cartridge slot of your console? Well, for just $50 you can get yourself an official Nintendo 64 Cleaning Kit. This is basically just a fake cartridge with a rubber bar where the metal contacts would normally be, and it’s designed to clean the contacts of your console.

You simply plug the fake cartridge in, take it out, maybe repeat once or twice, and you’re good to go! That’s right, Nintendo sold a fake Game Pak for simply cleaning the cartridge slot – something you can do for free with just a cotton swab and some isopropyl alcohol. Save the money and get another controller instead.

3 Flash Carts Are Now Freely Available

Nintendo 64 Flash Cart

While counterfeit carts are rampant, it does mean that flash cartridges are freely available. These legally dubious products contain dozens or even hundreds of games on a single Game Pak. The trick is, the data isn’t stored on the cartridge itself, but an SD or micro SD card held in a Nintendo 64 cartridge housing.

RELATED: The Last Games To Come Out On The Nintendo 64

Many collectors see this as a great middle-ground between emulation and original hardware. It saves money from collecting now expensive games, but it also allows you to play on the original console, with the original controller.

2 Wide Boy Let You Play Game Boy Games

Nintendo 64 Wide Boy on TV

Nintendo has a long history of releasing peripherals that allowed you to play Game Boy games on your TV using one of their game consoles. While such a product was never publicly released for the Nintendo 64, it did exist for developers and game retailers.

Nintendo’s internal developer, Intelligent Systems, created the Wide Boy 64 to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games using a Nintendo 64. It was basically a giant Game Pak that you plugged into the Nintendo 64 cartridge port, which allowed you to plug in a Game Boy game on top. It was used mostly by retailers to demonstrate new Game Boy releases on a big screen or for game tournaments like the Pokémon League Summer Training Tour in 1999.

1 Nintendo 64 Cartridges Are Bigger Than They Need to Be

Nintendo 64 opened up

One of the strangest things about Game Paks is that they’re far bigger than they need to be. If you open up an N64 cart and take a peek inside, you’ll see all the components take up only about half of the external shell. The rest is literally just empty space.

The reason for this is likely that Nintendo wanted to give players plenty of room to grab the cart and pull it out of the console. The original NES didn’t give players much room to pull the cart out from its bizarre drawer-loading system, so Nintendo likely wanted to make sure that wouldn’t be a problem again.

NEXT: N64 Games That Never Got Re-Released (But Really Should Be)