Did blowing on your Nintendo game actually help?

Mental Floss answers the most important question of our time: Does blowing in your Nintendo game actually help?

The answer: No. It actually can hurt the game and cause the connections to rust. So how, then, did blowing in your game spread? Their experts weigh in:

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.

[Via Reverend Dave]

NintendoVideo gameSeptember 24, 2012