Ask iFixit: Does Blowing Into Gaming Cartridges Actually Fix Them?

My friends blew on their Nintendo cartridges.

It was like muscle memory for them. They'd encounter a glitch, yank the cartridge out, blow on it, and then thrust it back in and hope that it'd be better for the next hurried speedrun. Rituals were had of blowing nto games before even playing them the first time, so as to ward off the glitch demons pre-emptively.

We never did this in our family. When we started encountering glitches, our dad called Nintendo to ask about the problems we were having with the [rather expensive] system he'd bought. They sent a kit for cleaning cartridges, which included a wide, flat absorbant swab wrapped with some kind of seemingly-synthetic absorbent material and a little drippy bottle full of isopropyl alcohol.

This actually worked. (IIRC, during that phone call they also issued interim instructions for using a Q-tip and isopropyl to get things moving while the package was shipped.)

We didn't have anywhere near the problems with glitches that our friends did. Mostly, the games just worked with some occsasional cleaning and time to dry out.

Interesting article. Blowing into cartridges fixed them many times for me. Although in reality it was likely re-inserting them that maybe did it and also the paragraph about adding moisture being a bad thing is obviously correct, now I wonder if that added moisture actually improved the connectivity on already corroded contacts.

It's essentially the old school version of "turn it off and on again", but the physical ritual aspects of reseating the cart (which was helpful) and blowing on it (which was likely placebo) made us felt that we made some effort to make things work. It's one of the weird details that adds to the experience.

In comparison, the modern "turn it off and turn it back on" just don't have the right tactile feel to it. Except maybe when power cycle doesn't work and you have to pull the battery.

I wonder if the ritual of taking the cartridge out and re-inserting it scraped a bit of dirt or corrosion off of the contacts which was actually what made it work.

>That essentially made them hot-swappable extension cards for the console.

I can't think of any game that involves removing or inserting a cartridge while the console is on.

(in a middle 30's aged voice:) This youngin does not realize that blowing in the cartridge did three things - 1.) Allowed the cartridge to reset, 2.) Removed dust particles on the contacts, and 3.) lowered the temperature inside the hot electronics which had no ventilation.

Speculation: It does two things, yes, it would blow dust particles, but I think also the moisture from the hot breath, combined with reinsertion, and the metal on metal contact, might be the trick.