Every Nintendo 64 Game Ever Could Fit On A Switch Cartridge
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Featured Image Credit: Nintendo
Yes, you read that headline correctly: every game ever made for the Nintendo 64 could fit on one single Nintendo Switch cartridge, with room to spare. Wow.
So, how exactly do we know this? Well, the working out has been done by Redditor CorsairVI (via Go Nintendo), who used some quick maths to derive the mind-blowing numbers. The Nintendo 64 had an international library of 388 unique games, each housed in their own stylish (max) 64MB cartridge.
The absolute maximum storage space of these games combined would be 24.83GB, if you times 64MB by the total number of N64 games (388). However, not every game made full use of its available storage space, so the actual combined storage space is likely lower than this estimate.
Regardless, the maximum number of 24.83GB would still fall far short of the maximum capacity of a Nintendo Switch cartridge, which currently stands at 32GB (just about big enough for the Switch version of The Witcher 3).
Take into account that while many Switch games do fit on the game cards you get in the shops, some require additional downloads onto a microSD just to play the things - such as L.A. Noire, which shipped for Switch on a 16GB card and required around 14GB of extra space for the rest of the content to be downloaded. And these days, finding any game, on any system, that is less than 100MB is a rarity.
As commenters on the Reddit post rightly point out, you could theoretically house the entire N64 library and an emulator to run them all on a single Switch game card. Food for thought given that there's a marked absence of a Mini version of the N64 on Nintendo's public plans.
This really puts the advancements in technology over time into perspective, too. We spend a lot of our days in the industry talking about incremental changes to next-generation games and consoles, but it's easy to forget exactly how far we've come in the last 24 years between the release of the N64 and today.
That said, do please give us an N64 Mini, Nintendo. Thanks.
Topics: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo 64, Mario, Nintendo