Did Blowing on Nintendo Cartridges Actually Work?

Joe Hanson of "It's Ok To Be Smart" takes on this topic, Mythbusters style. According to Joe, blowing into your NES cart didn't work at all and in fact, hurts it. The video answers the retro-mythical question "why did we all think blowing on our carts work, when it didn't?" It's a fairly in depth look at cognitive dissonance associated with certain actions we all do.

Zach_Foster wrote on 07/14/2014 at 01:38am

I dug through a lot of things like this when i picked up a couple non functioning NES consoles a few years back. I learned that pretty much everything i did to "improve" my games playing on my cartridge consoles was actually just destroying the games. Things like blowing on them, swabbing the contacts with rubbing alcohol, and smacking them against my knee turned out to be bad ideas. They seemed pretty good when i was six though.

Travis Admin wrote on 07/14/2014 at 02:30am

I did some research into this back in the day.

http://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/posts/1541/breathe-some-new-life-into-your-nes

Travis Admin wrote on 07/14/2014 at 02:34am

And to add to that, something I should have mentioned in the linked CG post-- I noticed when I was about 12 or 13 that blowing and trying again was about as effective as just changing the position slightly. You can just power off, push the cart left or right a bit, and try again, and it will work about as well as blowing.

I've replaced the connector in one NES, and bought a backup NES with a freshly replaced connector. I recently came into possession of a third, because you can never be too safe, and I need to replace the connector on it as well, but I've been testing the blow theory on it, and I have yet to get it to work on the first post-blow attempt, but just shifting it a bit works wonders.

So, in short-- when in doubt, just give it a little nudge.

JaBo wrote on 07/14/2014 at 03:36pm

We had one that would be fuzzy or discolored or wavy screen after you powered it on. The fix, every single time was to give it a smack on the right side after you powered it on. Worked every time and the picture was messed up like 90% of the time at least if you didn't do this. Maybe Rett can chime in if he reads this.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 07/14/2014 at 05:45pm

I bet the smack moved the game cart OR moved some faulty wire or something.

Zach_Foster wrote on 07/17/2014 at 03:47am

Or perhaps you got the haunted ghost NES! (limited edition). I believe at one point I had a haunted ghost Sega Genesis.

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