Why We All Blew Into NES Cartridges (and Why We’d Do It Again Anyway)
If you grew up in the 80s or early 90s, you know the ritual. You’d pop Super Mario Bros. into your Nintendo Entertainment System, hit the power button, and instead of a crisp title screen you’d get a flickering mess, maybe some scrambled blocks of color, maybe just a stubborn gray screen.
And then, like a priest performing a sacred rite, you’d pull the cartridge out, bring it to your lips, and blow into it. A good puff, maybe a double-puff for insurance. Then back in it went. Miraculously, Mario appeared.
So, did it actually work? Or were we just spitting into $50 hunks of plastic for nothing? Let’s dive into the science, the physics, and the psychology.
The Origin of the Blow
The NES, released in the U.S. in 1985, wasn’t just revolutionary because it revived the video game industry. It was also famously temperamental. Its “Zero Insertion Force” (ZIF) cartridge slot was supposed to be easy on kids’ hands. Instead, the design was prone to poor contact between the cartridge pins and the system’s internal connector.
Result: games wouldn’t load, or they’d freeze mid-play. Enter the urban engineering of desperate children: the blow.
The beauty of this ritual is in its simplicity: the NES connector is a row of metal contacts; the cartridge has a corresponding row of pins. If the two aren’t perfectly aligned, the game refuses to run. And when that happened, kids everywhere instinctively did what we still do in moments of technological frustration: we blamed physics.
The Science of Spit and Dust
Here’s the thing: technically, blowing into the cartridge shouldn’t help.
Dust removal? Maybe. A short puff could dislodge loose particles from the contacts. But the inside of a cartridge is actually pretty well shielded; dust alone wasn’t the main culprit.
Moisture effect? More likely, the tiny bit of humidity from your breath temporarily improved conductivity between the cartridge pins and the NES connector. Think of it like licking your finger to turn a page. Gross, but effective.
The downside: repeated blowing actually corroded the contacts over time, thanks to all that moisture and microscopic spit particles. Nintendo even warned in manuals: “Do not blow on your Game Paks.” (As if anyone listened.)
In short: the blow may have done something, but mostly it was magical thinking paired with dumb luck.
We asked our friends what their favorite Nintendo Entertainments Systems games were. Here’s what they said.
The Physics of Ritual
The “NES Blow” depicted in the nostalgic series “The Goldbergs”. 2013 - 2023
Here’s where things get fascinating: even if the blow had zero actual effect, it still would’ve felt like it worked. Why?
Random chance: Sometimes reinserting the cartridge without blowing would’ve fixed the connection anyway.
The ritual factor: We always blew, so we associated success with the act. That’s pure psychology, the same principle behind baseball players’ lucky socks or gamblers’ “hot streaks.”
Kid logic: If one blow didn’t work, clearly the answer was more blows. Or maybe blowing harder. (Extra points if you gave the cartridge a little tap for good measure.)
The NES wasn’t just a console. It was a classroom in primitive troubleshooting, trial and error, and ritual magic.
Types of Blowers
Christopher Reeves as Superman… blowing HARD!
Let’s categorize the famous NES cartridge blowers, a taxonomy every 80s/90s kid would recognize:
The Quick Puff – A casual, breezy blow. Usually worked by coincidence rather than skill.
The Deep Inhaler – Took a long breath and exhaled like a fireman. High commitment, high risk of moisture damage.
The Overachiever – Blow, tap, blow again, spin cartridge around, and sometimes even whisper encouragements. Most likely to break your game in frustration.
The Buddy System – Two kids taking turns blowing while the other holds the console steady. Purely social, extra magical.
No matter the method, all were sacred, shared, and by some miracle, occasionally effective.
Would We Have Done It Anyway?
Blowing out the NES game was as much a ritual as blowing out candles on your birthday!
Absolutely. Even if some omniscient voice from the future had told us in 1989: “Kids, this is actually corroding your games,” we’d still have done it. Because:
It was tactile. Blowing made us feel like we were doing something instead of just turning the system off and on again.
It was communal. Everyone knew “the blow.” It was playground wisdom passed down like folklore.
It was magical. You can’t deny the satisfaction of blowing into Contra, reinserting it, and seeing that title screen spring to life.
And let’s be honest: it felt good to be the hero who knew the trick, while your friends sat there amazed.
A Lesson in Technology and Human Nature
In many ways, the NES blow is emblematic of how kids interact with technology. We don’t just fix things. We perform fixes, adding ritual, hope, and superstition into every attempt. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Always, it makes the process more entertaining.
It’s a reminder that human ingenuity is as much about psychology as it is about engineering. Spit, superstition, and stubbornness were just as important as the circuitry inside the NES.
The Afterlife of the Blow
Today, collectors cringe at the thought of all that spit accelerating corrosion in their vintage cartridges. Modern cleaning kits and isopropyl alcohol are the “real” solutions. But nostalgia isn’t about what worked best. It’s about what we did.
The blow was more than troubleshooting. It was a little ritual of childhood, a shared moment of tech voodoo. It was part science, part superstition, part kid ingenuity.
So no, blowing into NES cartridges wasn’t really good for them. But back then? It worked because we believed it did. And honestly, isn’t that half the magic of the 80s and 90s anyway?
Jamie and Milo debate gaming. and the video game console rivalry between the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation 1.