Retro Gaming: The Green Screen of Death

Some friends have suggested I join a Facebook group called When I was your age, we had to blow on our video games to make them work! Those were the days, eh? Pop a game in the NES, gently push it down into place, turn on the power, and you'd be greeted with a screen flashing green, gray, and brown. The phenomena lead to game retailers peddling cleaning kits that would fix your cartridges.

They did get dirty, but it was rarely the games that were the problem, it was the 72-Pin connectorinside the NES itself that would eventually stop making the right connection. The design was terrible, with the internal connector being bent in with every use, and the death of any moderately used system was inevitable, so why did they make this thing so badly?

The Nintendo Entertainment System went to market just after the so-called Video Game Crash of 1984. There weren't Gamestop shops all over America's strip malls back then, and gaming stuff was mostly sold in department stores like Sears. After the crash, retailers wouldn't touch home video games with a ten foot pole, so Nintendo marketed it not as a computer systems as the Atari was, but rather an Entertainment System. Nintendo's design totally hid the cartridge, with hopes that it wouldn't be associated with what had come before, top loading game consoles.
The gambit worked, and the NES went on to sell in record breaking numbers and became the king of home gaming for years after, and laid the foundation for Nintendo's future portable and home consoles. Just before Nintendo retired the format, they released a revised model where you loaded the cartridge from the top. The games that would blink away on your old machine now worked right every time, but the thing looked so crazy because the cartridges were so tall.


The top-loader NES was a big ticket item on online auction sites for years until cheap clones flooded the market in the late about five years back, and now you can find high quality replacement 72-pin connectors for your old gray box. Now we can all enjoy our NES classics on our first loading attempt!