Video game cartridges in the 1980s did not actually benefit from being violently blown into when they failed to load, despite millions of kids treating human breath like a…

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Video game cartridges in the 1980s did not actually benefit from being violently blown into when they failed to load, despite millions of kids treating human breath like a magical repair tool; the moisture from your spit actually accelerated the corrosion of the sensitive copper pins inside the cartridge, meaning this widespread playground ritual was actively destroying your expensive copies of Super Mario, and while taking the cartridge out and reinserting it was what actually fixed the connection issue by realigning the pins, our primitive monkey brains linked the blowing action to the success because we usually did it right before putting the game back in, making it one of the greatest technological placebo effects in history and proving we will believe any superstition if it gets the game to work