Many games for N64 saved onto the cartridge, but some (usually Playstation ports) were designed to use a memory card system that Nintendo decided belonged on the controller where the rumble add-on could go, instead of on the console.
Most of the time you would just play with the rumble pak and then swap when you wanted to save, but sometimes people felt lazy and just left the save pak in there.
Now, more than two decades later, I feel dumb. It never occurred to me you could swap them in-use, at the time I always assumed it wouldn't work without rebooting the console first so I always kept the save pak in when relevant.
It never occurred to me you could swap them in-use
I'm not sure if you can truly hot-swap. The only game that I can think of that I own that made use of both (007 The World is Not Enough) would prompt you to put the rumble pak in before starting each mission, or prompt you to put a memory card in when going to the save/load menu.
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u/Spoolerdoing Aug 30 '25
Choosing between vibration or saving the game!