It’s the last day of Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

Blowing onto a cartridge before inserting it into a game console has been a longstanding source of debate. It’s an image so iconic it could be juxtaposed with a pencil next to a cassette tape, or holding the TV aerial for better reception – yet modern understanding of the issue is that it actually makes things worse, as bits of your saliva on contacts make them corrode over time.

But what if you ventured out to do the opposite? What if you wanted to intentionally mess up with the cartridge connection and see what happens?

Well, this is apparently called cartridge tilting, and is a curious pastime:

Cartridge tilting is not a glitch, but rather the process which creates glitches.

This can only be done on any NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Leapfrog LeapPad, Sega Genesis/​Mega Drive, Sega Master System, or Game Boy series console. Most other consoles either use CDs/​DVDs, or the design of the system doesn’t allow for cartridge tilting, and thus cannot perform these glitches.

In the middle of the game, slowly and surely wiggle the cartridge and move it from side to side. If you do it too slow, nothing will happen, and doing it too fast will disconnect the game. Eventually, the cartridge will enter a state where it’s not fully connected to the console but not completely disconnected. Thus, enough information from the cartridge is blocked to glitch up the game, but not enough to make it freeze, crash, or otherwise error out.

Warnings:

• Doing this can cause some games to corrupt or erase their save data.
• Doing this can ruin your cartridge and possibly damage hardware.
• Doing this can freeze, hang (permanently freeze), or crash your game. This will also glitch your sounds and can even be loud.
• Doing this also can cause short circuits.

The page above lists a bunch of examples and there are tons of videos on YouTube. I’ll let you find them if you want, but I want to show you the most famous one.

This is the regular opening of 1997’s GoldenEye game for Nintendo 64:

And this is what happens when you wiggle a cartridge as it’s playing. This results in music being garbled, and as for the visuals – well, see for yourself:

For some reason I find this so, so funny. Knowing everything you know about how games work, you definitely would not expect this to happen. Somehow, this glitch (which became a meme) has a positively analogue quality: