Did Blowing into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help?

I remember when I was a kid and had a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), sometimes the games wouldn't load. But we all knew the secret: take out the game cartridge, blow on the contacts, and put it back in.  It worked! (When it failed, I'd just keep trying until it worked.) But looking back, did blowing into the cartridge really help? I'm not sure why I am even writing a blog post about this, lol.  I had a sudden urge the other day to play the old Mario Bros., Duck Hunt and Zelda. The good news (for me) is that Nintendo NES's still exist!  I was looking on Ebay and they are anywere from $60 - $800 ...what the hell?!   There are some on craigslist, and amazon has alot of them for sale around $30 - $50, so that is the best deal I've found so far and you can click HERE to see them.  I am going to get this and show my son how video gaming got started lol! 


Here is a photo of the ORIGINAL Nintendo in Japan, before they made our beloved Nintendo NES.

Crazy right?  The NES console marketed in the US looked very different from Nintendo's original Famicom console sold in Japan. The Famicom (short for Family Computer) is shown above -- it featured a top loading design in which you crammed the cartridge into a slot on the top. (It also featured a snazzy red-and-cream color scheme that to my eye looks a bit like Voltron.) By putting the cartridge in on top, the label on the Famicom cartridge served as a kind of billboard, advertising the game currently being played. When Nintendo created the NES for the US, a major design change was to place that cartridge slot deep inside a VCR-style gray box.  It was similar technology, but hidden in a way that American consumers might assume was more like a familiar VCR -- and more importantly, different from game consoles like the Atari 2600, which were old news. Nintendo wanted to be new, and better -- so it hid its slot.  No pun intended

What Nintendo tried to emulate was a "Zero Insertion Force" (ZIF) connection -- a phrase that sounds like a bad joke about problems in bed, but is a real engineering notion. A ZIF connection is one in which the user doesn't directly press the cartridge into its host connector -- no insertion force is exerted by the user. This is a good thing from an engineering standpoint because users can do things like push too hard, and eventually connectors that require this kind of contact wear out. A typical mid-to-late 80s VCR is a variant of ZIF design: the tape goes in the front, then the machine grabs it and gently pulls it into place. That's a pretty durable design. That's not what the NES had, though. Its slot required insertion force, and it was buried inside a box

So, back to the blowing of the cartridge....

First up, Vince Clemente, producer of The Tetris Masters, a documentary about players of the classic NES Tetris. 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. But it works. [laughs]" This sums up the problem: although intellectually we knew that blowing into electronics was bad, we did it anyway. It seemed to work.

Next, I looked up Frank Viturello, who is one of the hosts of the gaming show Digital Press Webcast  among many other gaming-related projects -- he also worked in a game store for years. This guy interviewed Viturello about this subject:

Viturello's first response was: "While I admittedly may have dabbled in a little cartridge-blowing as a naive NES-playing youth, I've long-since been an advocate for not doing it with the stance that for whatever it may do to aid in the temporary functionality of an NES, it ultimately opens the door for damage and distress to the hardware."

Higgins: "How did this lore about blowing into the cartridges spread across the US?"

Viturello: "It was very much a hive-mind kind of thing, something that all kids did, and many still do on modern cartridge based systems. Prior to the NES I don't recall people blowing into Atari or any other cartridge-based hardware that predated the NES (though that likely spoke to the general reliability of that hardware versus the dreaded front-loading Nintendo 72 Pin connectors). I suppose it has a lot to do with the placebo effect. US NES hardware required, on most games, optimal connection across up to 72 pins as well as communication with a security lock-out chip. The theory that 'dust' could be a legitimate inhibitor and that 'blowing it out' was the solution, still sounds silly to me when I say it out loud."

Higgins: "Why would blowing into the cartridges have any effect? It feels like it works, sometimes."

Viturello: "While there are some collectors/enthusiasts who will defend their position that the moisture in human breath will likely cause no damage to an NES cartridge, based on what I've personally seen over the past 20 years, I not only disagree with them, but feel strongly that the connection/correlation between blowing into an NES cartridge and the potential for long-term effects including wear, corrosion of the metal contacts, mold/mildew growth, is sound logic.

So, WHY does blowing into a cartridge have any effect? I'm not a scientist and I don't have any real empirical evidence, but I'm happy to speculate. The most reasonable explanations -- in my opinion -- are:

1.) The act of removing, blowing in, and re-seating a cartridge most likely creates another random opportunity for the connection to be better made. So removing the cartridge 10 times and putting back in without blowing on it might net the exact same results as blowing on it between each time.

And 2.) The moisture that occurs when you blow into a cartridge has some type of immediate effect on the electrical connection that occurs. Either the moisture helps to eliminate/move any debris/chemical buildup that has occurred when the contacts and the pin-readers rub together, or the moisture increases conductivity to a degree that it can send the data through any existing matter that was previously interfering with the connection. Those are my best theories."

The good news (for me) is that Nintendo NES's still exist!  I was looking on Ebay and they are anywere from $60 - $800 ...what the hell?!   There are some on craigslist, and amazon has alot of them for sale around $30 - $50, so that is the best deal I've found so far and you can click HERE to see them.  I am going to get this and show my son how video gaming got started lol!