My brother and I bonded over video games like little else in our lives. The very first game I ever bought with my own money was Wizards and Warriors for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I bought it at the grocery store with cash I’d gotten together from a horrible job working at the local Tran and Skeet club.
We rented a game nearly every weekend, but there was nothing more fun than owning our own games. The high of bring home a purchased game was put into stark counterpoint by the lows of buying a game and then having it stop working. If you ever had one of the old Nintendo’s, you know exactly how frustrating it was to put a cartridge in, only to have the blue screen pop up and flicker retro video games.
So what would you do? You’d take the game out and blow into the cartridge until your face would turn blue. Sometimes that would fix it, sometimes it wouldn’t. As we moved onwards and upwards into the Super Nintendo, and then into the more advanced consoles that required discs, we kept experiencing problems with functionality. More often than not, it was our own fault.
Our games weren’t treated as well as they should have been, particularly in what I’ll generously call our storage methods. Below I’m going to lay out the two absolute worst things you can do for the longevity of your games, whether they’re retro cartridges or blue ray discs.
1. Stuff them in a box
Boxes were the main culprit for dust. If we were ever forced to blow into a game, it was generally because we crammed our games in a box and let them get musty and stale. Shoe boxes were usually what we used.
2. Stack them anywhere and everywhere
It’s a miracle any of our games survived. We would stack them on the desk, or on the end table, or on the corner of the bed, or on top of a stack of CDs–a stack on top of a stack! These inevitably wound up crashing to the floor. Sometimes we’d notice and move them (probably back into a shoe box). But just as often we’d fail to see them and wind up stepping on them and gnashing our teeth in woe.
Kids will be kids. There’s probably no surer solution to the problem of game protection than just buying some furniture designed for that very thing.
These days, nothing makes me more nostalgic than the beeps and bops of the old Mario Brothers Games. Mario, Luigi, we didn’t treat you as well as you deserved, but thanks for the memories.