[rlanday]

The truth of this claim is disputed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/ft63zn/dk64_memory_lea...

The lead artist claims they’d always been planning to make use of it. There’s compelling evidence of a memory leak or similar issue since the released version of the game apparently crashes if you leave it running for some amount of time over 10 hours (which wasn’t usually a problem in practice except for very long speedruns until it was released on Wii U Virtual Console and people started using save states which don’t reset the timer the same way as turning the game off and on does).

[monocasa]

I've heard the the lead programmer confirm it, and I trust him more than the lead artist.

I _think_ it was on the documentary clips shipped with Rare Replay, but I'm not 100% on that.