Why does blowing into a cartridge work

But remember: to blow on the cart, you had to take it out first. It seems more likely that it was the simple act of removing the cart and re-inserting it - giving the connector pins another chance to connect properly - that brought your games back to life, not the blowing. Indeed, blowing was actually bad for your system. Because some components were made of copper, the moisture you exhale when blowing would eventually, over time, damage the cartridges, and maybe even your NES itself.

Nintendo even warned against this in the fine print of its products, stating:. Do not blow into your Game Paks or systems. Viturello took two copies of the game Gyromite, one to be blown, the other to sit around on a shelf in the same room as the other. He then blew on the one copy ten times in quick succession each day, essentially in the same basic way gamers the world over do when trying to fix the game so it works.

Certainly a much bigger sample size and much more detailed data would be needed for more definitive results. For example, it would be interesting to track the number of failures after insertion of a game, along with the number of blows, the humidity levels over time, etc.

However, this much more basic experiment did very clearly demonstrate the significant effect blowing on the pins has, with the blown on pins developing a clearly visible layer of something over the course of the month and the blows. It should also be noted here while the pins on the games could have been relatively easily cleaned, the pins on the ZIF connector inside the console are note quite as easily restored to their former shiny selves without taking the console apart, making blowing inside the console itself an even worse idea.

The moisture in your breath can corrode and contaminate the pin connectors. And while bad connections did become less of a problem with the release of future consoles like the Super Nintendo and the N64, occasional blowing before insertion was still a thing, resulting in Nintendo actually putting a message on the back of every N64 game cartridge again saying not to blow on the pins.

But even this potential extremely minor, if any, benefit would be significantly outweighed by the long term downsides of blowing on the pins. The real benefit of this blowing method was seemingly just that you were removing the cartridge and putting it back in, thus, re-seating it and giving the potential for a proper connection.

If things go wrong, such as the console not reading the game or the game is glitching or blinking, it's often a problem between the system and the cart. It turns out that the secret was much simpler than blowing the dust off our favorite games, and instead, what actually helped was removing the cartridge from the console and putting it back again--so blowing never really did anything to help, according to the PBS Digital Studios show "It's OK to be Smart" that is available on YouTube.

On a support page for the Nintendo NES game, the company specifically said to "not blow into your Game Paks or systems. Based on what the gaming giant said, the moisture from our breaths could cause pin connectors to corrode and get contaminated. Moreover, Chris Higgins from Mental Floss had written an article about the whole blowing-on-game-cartridges myth, saying that everything might have been nothing but "pure placebo.

In the NES, the user opened a front flap, slid a cartridge into the machine, and the insertion force occurred at the back of the machine, where the hidden cartridge slot lived—pins within the cartridge crammed up against the slot in the back.

Then the user pushed the cartridge down again emulating the behavior of a VCR and powered on the console. This little ritual felt very satisfying, but over time the cartridge slot got dirty, its springs wore out, and the cartridges themselves got dirty. All of these factors worked together to cause poor contact between cartridge and slot, which meant your game just didn't work—the machine couldn't communicate with the cartridge over a bad connection, and frustration ensued.

Nintendo designed its NES connector using nickel pins bent into a position so that they'd give slightly when a cartridge was inserted, then spring back after it was removed. These pins became less springy after repeated use, which make it hard for them to firmly grasp the game cartridge's connectors. To make things worse, the cartridges themselves had copper connectors.

Copper tarnishes when exposed to air, causing it to develop a distinctive patina. While this patina was often not bad enough to cause problems, an overzealous kid ahem, like me might notice this effect and ahem attempt to remove it using all sorts of things from erasers to steel wool to solvents side-note: my father, being a computer guy, had access to a magical substance called Cramolin—apparently worth its weight in gold, it could clean anything.

Enough overzealous cleaning could ruin a connector, rendering the cartridge unplayable. I know this because I did it. When things went wrong inside your NES, the problem was usually a bad connection between the cartridge and its slot. That could be due to tarnishing, corrosion, crud in various places, weak pins in the slot, or other issues. The symptoms of a bad connection could include the game not starting at all, the console showing a blinking light, or the game starting up with garbage all over the screen below, a photo of Zelda II shows this form of startup glitch.

To combat these problems, in the mids my friends and I somehow learned this secret: if we took out the cartridge, blew in it, and reinserted it, it worked. And if it didn't work the first time, it eventually worked, on the second or fifth or tenth time. But looking back on it, I wondered: did that blowing actually help? And if it did Was dust the culprit, and I was blowing it out of the cartridge?

I spoke with several experts who insisted they were not experts, despite their backgrounds to find out. Clemente said, "[Blowing in the cartridge] is actually terrible for the games and makes the contacts rust. You're really not supposed to do it.