This post was spawned by an e-mail forward turned legitimate conversation with a friend. Prime example. If you’re at least 20 years old, you likely had a Nintendo of the “regular” variety which was bestowed with that unbecoming adjective with the coming of the Super Nintendo.

Follow me for a second.

So you’re popping in the golden cartridge of The Legend of Zelda and you get nothing but a blank screen. You hit power on and off repeatedly for a few seconds and you still get a blank screen. What did you do about it?

You took the cartridge out and you blew in it, pushed the cartridge as hard as you could into the back of the system, and flipped the switch. And it worked (almost) everytime.

How did you learn about that? We didn’t have Google around but every kid knew this trick. It wasn’t documented. I actually personally referenced the manuals of a few games and of the system itself and I could find no troubleshooting step that had us blow in the cartridge. And it’s not like this is a natural step in the evolution of troubleshooting, it’s a rather peculiar thing to do.

Thinking back, I first learned the trick from a friend… but how did he figure it out? He probably found out from one of his friends.

My question is two-fold:

1) How did this become known in every single 80s/early 90s household? And

2) Who was the first person who did this?

We now have the Internet so maybe we’ll figure it out.