Blowing The Dust Out Of A Nintendo Cartridge

The theory behind blowing on cartridges is that dust can build up on the contacts and prevent a clean connection from occurring when placed in the console. Whether this is true or not is up for debate, but this practice was still widely used during the years when cartridge-based consoles were popular.

If a player inserted a cartridge into a console and it failed to work, he or she would pull it out and blow hard into the recessed area at the bottom where the contacts were. If dust had built up, it would be blown away. Nintendo did not endorse this practice, claiming that moisture from the mouth would slowly corrode the cartridge contact.

There were other reasons for connection failures that blowing would not fix. For example, the original NES was famous for the wear and tear that would eventually accumulate on its cartridge connector from normal use.