Because there was absolutely no point in blowing Nintendo’s cartridges

We all did. When a videogame gave up on us halfway through, we’d take out the cartridge, blow it in, put it back in the console, and press play. And probably, most of the time, everything went well.

Are we sure this really happened?

In the first place, why did we do it?

Since the birth of humanity, our minds have been “trained” to recognize patterns and associations. The red light on the road is what stops us as we walk, while the green is the signal to start. But when suddenly, there are no patterns and associations in front of us, but a state of chaos, then our mind again seeks to create its own associations.

Then we fall into the trap of logical fallacy. More specifically, in the case of “I blow on the Nintendo cartridge to make it play”, there is a post hoc fallacy, also known as “casual association” or “false causation”. That is, if something happens after something else, then the first must be the cause of the second.

Where lies the error

It is a fact that the cause precedes the effect. The fallacy occurs when we draw conclusions solely from the time sequence of events, without having clear evidence that the events are connected to each other.

Let’s say an example. In May 2021, vaccinations for the corona virus increased in our country. In June, there was an increase in fires in insular Greece. It would be a fallacy to claim that because more people got vaccinated against the coronavirus, more forests burned in Greece.

Did what we did make any sense?

According to Den of Geek, blowing the Nintendo console’s cartridge (we did it too when we had a Mega Drive) as a necessary procedure to make it play better, without “snows”, was an urban myth.

Nintendo game consoles, such as the NES and Nintendo 64, are manufactured using the ZIF (Zero Injection Force) standard, meaning zero force is required to “snap” the cartridge into the console.

Damage to the inside of the console was caused when the user exerted force while inserting the cartridge into the game machine. And every time we pushed the cartridge hard to get it into the console, the damage got worse, eventually resulting in the loss of connection between the cartridge and the game console.

So the very movement of “removing and reinserting the cassette, maybe with a little composure, without force”, helped to improve the connection between the videogame and the console.

But the theory that blowing (and the saliva produced) could fix an entire fault in a Nintendo console (in addition to removing some dust) is a good urban myth, a logical fallacy that persists to this day.