How did we all know how to do this?
I know for a fact that no one told me about this trick of the trade. And when i saw one of my friends do it i was amazed that he knew how to make the games work like i did.
So far i have a 100% blowing into the NES cart record from all of my friends who had or still have an NES.
Amazing, is all i can say.
Well, it’s because…of…the…ummm…
Well, obviously we read…it in…errr…
Ok, beats the hell outta me. I suppose it was just common sense? “There’s probably some fuzz in there. Blowing on it will remove the fuzz”.
I guess <shrug>.
I always did it because I thought, hey there must be dust on there! It’s the barrier between me and my game.
That and I used to shove the instruction book in there on top of the game to get it to stay in place.
HA!
I knew it!
we have 2
I just wonder where my 4yr old learned to do this. Must have seen me. 
I have no idea where it came from, but I always did it, and so did everyone else I knew.
Anyone else done the “stuff an extra cartridge in there to hold it down” trick?
/proud owner of a refurbished NES he bought on eBay
I did the blow. Did the stuff-in-the-extra-cartridge.
But did anybody do the “Rub your finger back and forth in the little slot on the right side of the cartridge while it’s in the deck?”
Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
You know what was cool? Playing COLECOVISION games with the cartridge half-assedly inserted so that the sprites went all blocky and blinky. That was cool.
How about using the cleaning solution on a q-tip to clean the cartidge, and the parts inside? I remember doing that a LOT. I kept a supply of q-tips by the NES itself just for this purpose.
Anyone else use the Game Genie to get the game to work? Not use the codes for the Genie, but just to get the game working right.
Why did this work anyway? It was said to be “dust”, but those were pretty damn big contact pads and dust is very small. In these modern days, I never have to blow on my compact flash cards to get them to work and we still have dust.
But it worked so there must be something to it.
I suspect this was inspired by that other thread. But yea, it just seemed to be part of the Collective Kid Hive Mind we all shared. Here’s my solution order:
Blow in it
Peer into it, blow into it again, smack it against my hand
Clean it with alcohol and the Q-tips I kept stashed in the entertainment center for this purpose.
Clean it with spit.
If spit didn’t make it work, nothing could. I even had the Official NES cleaning kit, with that stick thingie with blue and white cleaning thingies, and it didn’t work half as well as spit.
I thought everybody got this from me - since I know I was the first one to think of it!
All of you are wrong:
I was the first one to ever do this.
Ok, maybe not but I did develop the technique independantly.
I also used alcohol and q-tips, the game genie and slamming the cart into the connector.
so…my assuptions are correct.
not just my friends and i knew the “trick”.
awesome.
I now own a top loading NES, and i have to do the blowing thing infrequentely, so maybe it was the original NES’s problem.
(I heard these top loaders are going for a bundle on ebay.)
Blowing into NES cartridges is actually an ancient Japanese trick that dates back thousands of years.
Really? I have one…
Hmmmm…
My thing that I do with my NES is not to push the game in all the way and not to push it down like you’re supposed to with an NES. You see, once it broke and went in to get fixed. Since then, pushing the game down was OPTIONAL. If a game does not work like that, generally I just won’t push it in all the way.
But we all blow on them! It is a necessity.
My original NES still works perfectly 
I would also blow into the cartridge, and have no idea where I picked it up. I also did the stuff-in-the-extra-cartridge trick, which I’m pretty sure I figured out for myself.
Do you mean using that little slot to jiggle the cartridge around in the deck?
Yep, we blew on them. Blow on the game, and then in the system if it still wouldn’t work. Then we’d put the game in not quite all the way, so the slant on the edge of the cartridge was over the lip of the NES. Then slam the game down into the NES so it slides in with a big “Thunk!”
I found the best trick to making a cart. work is to insert it all the way in, drag it some, so that when you push it down it barely fits through, and then turn on the console. Works every time.