Blowing into Nintendo cartridges loosens dust but accellerates corrosion and shortenes their lives. This is perhaps the well-known given wisdom these days, but iFixit took a deeper dive into the cartridge conundrum. Teardowns!
Here's a video showing off that official cleaning kit, embedded below.
Four years after the launch of the NES, they released an official NES Cleaning Kit which included cleaning accessories for both the cartridge and the slot. Additionally, Nintendo's troubleshooting website for the NES Game Pak was updated to explicitly state that you should "not blow into your Game Paks or systems" sometime around the mid 2000s. A similar warning was also printed on the backside of Nintendo 64 cartridges.
Here's the thing: Nintendo cartridge-blowing was a ritual. You weren't blowing out dust, you were blowing in a blessing.
