It's a figure of speech. Late in the game as in late in the generation. I was referring specifically to Factor 5 writing custom microcode to turn shit off so they could run at 640x480. That was late in the generation around 1999/2000 when they did that, after the Dreamcast and PS2 were out.
And while we're on this topic of N64 Resolution, here's an interesting topic I found where a person was looking at what the game is actually coded to run at by doing frame buffer dumps and also using an emulator plugin that doesn't upscale from the native resolution. The results are pretty interesting:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comme...n64_games_ran/
Turns out Factor 5's games are not running at 640x480, they are instead running at 400x440.