Why Nintendo Cartridges Required Blowing

There really is no way to word that title that doesn't sound weird is there?

[caption id="attachment_172" align="alignleft" width="268" caption="Blow Me"][/caption]

Anyway, this is super geeky, but I happened to look this up on Wikipedia a while back and thought that others might find this interesting.

I doubt that there is a single person in the world who owned a Nintendo and didn't have to do this at least once: You put a game in and press power. The screen as well as the red light on the Nintendo blink on an off. What do you do? You take it out, blow into it and put it back in. Problem solved...until you have to do it again (and again). Why?

To save you time I'll paraphrase the article:

There were a shit load of video game systems that failed in the early eighties. Nintendo wanted their system to stand out so they made a front loading system similar to a VCR. The problem with this design was found in the metal chips on the cartridge itself as well as those inside the Nintendo. When both were brand spanking new, the metal slots would align and info would pass between with no problem. After repeatedly putting games in and taking them out, the slots started to wear down and didn't connect too well. So, info didn't pass too well. Dirt and dust exacerbated the problem. So that's why blowing worked sometimes. Nintendo said you shouldn't do it, but hey it worked...sorta.

When it didn't work and you kept getting the flash, it was because of Nintendo's crappy authentication system. The technical aspects of it are beyond the scope of my knowledge, but it all came down to a timing mechanism that measured how fast info was transmitted to verify that it was an actual Nintendo game. If it didn't transmit correctly, then it locked out the game and you got a blinking light. Well, bent and worn down slots slowed down the timing which is why some games just blinked no matter how much you blew in them.

[caption id="attachment_168" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Mario is The One!"][/caption]

Being the inadvertent geniuses that we were, we all learned some way to slam the cartridge in there (mostly out of frustration) to get it to work...until someone bump
ed into it just as you were about to kill Bowser for the eighth time and then Mario turned into The Matrix with letters and code everywhere.