Hrrm, being that cartridge space is absolutely premium, and the size of the games affected their profitability, I wonder if this code was left in there with the space trade off of other features. (Golden Eye was a 96 megabit/12 megabyte cartridge.)
GoldenEye has a surprising amount of stuff "left over" on the cartridge (levels, meshes, weapons, scripts) which people have been digging out for years: http://tcrf.net/Goldeneye_007
It would be really interesting to know about the environment that generated something like that.
Time was probably at a much bigger premium than cartridge space while it was under development, as I don't remember hearing that later Rare games had quite so much left over in them.
The cartridges have a fixed size, so if the game was made to fit in a bit less than 12MB but more than 8MB(or 10MB I didn't lookup the size of rom chips) then the cartridge would cost the same
