It still feels like it should be orders of magnitude less. For example, if each piece of cheese has an ID number that maps to cheese, an ID for what area it’s in, three coordinates for where exactly it is, and maybe a few more variables like how much of it you’ve eaten. Each of those variables is probably only a couple of bytes, so each item is probably only 20B or so, which means that even if you interacted with a million different items and there was no compression going on then that’s still only 20MB of save data.
TF2 was my favourite game back in around 2011, it always felt like you could just jump into any game and have a go without needing too much teamwork.
I think I gave every class a good go (except spy, I could never deal with actually being able to trick other players), top are probably engineer, heavy, and medic.
It was designed so you could use left and right for a traditional 2D game, or middle and right for one of these newfangled 3D games that they didn’t know whether they’d catch on. GoldenEye also had a sort of proto-dual-stick layout where you could use left and middle!
What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.
I never had many n64 games but I only remember one actually needing the external memory pak. Most first-party games could just save to the cartridge, it’s only a few third parties that cheaped out and didn’t implement that. Meanwhile the PS1 was memory cards only.
Also I don’t think any console had internal storage until the Xbox which introduced a hard disk while the GameCube and PS2 were still using memory cards!