I happened to be looking through some N64 technical documents including a list of patents[1] and noticed that many of them seemed to have expired today!
including ones related to:
Z-buffering[2]
Starfox 64[3]
and Mario 64[4]
[1]: https://forums.cen64.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7
[2]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6414678
[3]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6540612
[4]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6331146
