during the nintendo 64's development in 1995, nintendo reported that the then-realized maximum cartridge size was 96 megabits (12 megabytes), with a theoretical maximum at the time of 256 megabits (32 megabytes). as fifth generation games became more complex in content, sound and graphics, they pushed game paks to the limits of their storage capacity. in practice, the few largest vintage game paks can hold up to 512 megabits (64 megabytes) of data, whereas cds can hold more than 650 mib. games ported from other media may utilize more aggressive data compression (as with "resident evil 2") or altered content (as with "spider-man" and "") so that they may be released on the nintendo 64. exceptionally large games on cd-based systems can be made to span across multiple discs, while most nintendo 64 games are contained within one game pak, as the use of an additional game pak or of one maximally sized game pak was often considered prohibitively expensive, and the 64dd expansion drive was released late and discontinued early.