The Rare Mistake That Led to an N64 RAM Upgrade (superjumpmagazine.com)

This reddit post questions the accuracy of the crash bug story and offers an alternative explanation - that the game was designed with the expansion pak in mind in the first place: https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/t2owki/psa_dk64s_expan...

A bit disingenuous to say N64 games cost $52 USD to manufacture. They did in 2021 dollars, but that's $30 in 1996 dollars when the console was released. The cost almost certainly went down as time went on.

I bought DK64, which was on sale for $40 at the time, to get the expansion pass so that I could play Perfect Dark, another Rareware title. At the time, Rare seemed to make all of the best games for the N64.