Dirty NES games for sale!

Over the past couple months I've started up a collection of NES games (there will be some more reviews soon). Until recently, I had taken a massive hiatus from old school gaming, and it seems that I'm not the only one who is returning back to the 8-bit NES. Buying games for older systems is a popular thing now, so there are tons and tons of them on auction websites and also some websites that specialize in modern games.

I don't want to list any specific stores, but I'm definitely noticing a trend with some of these eBay stores and websites: they all list games as being cleaned and tested. I have found that this is not true at least 50% of the time. Before I started getting into my recent NES hobby, my first move was to replace the 72-pin connector in the system, which is surprisingly easy, but it isn't something that I feel like doing over and over again. On the occasions where I'm lucky enough to pick up a game at a thrift store, I clean it, and if I clean it thoroughly enough, it works within a minute generally. Some games will literally work on the first or second try; I'm not constantly blowing on the contacts of the cartridge over and over again, as I think we all did years ago.

Initially, I was quite naive when purchasing used NES carts online. I would feel at ease when reading that a game has been "cleaned and tested." A cartridge that has been cleaned and tested is so appealing because not only does it mean that the game works, but I won't have to do any cleaning, and I should be able to play it right after I get it in the mail. I immediately put the first few "cleaned and tested" carts in my NES expecting the games to load with minimal effort. Very quickly, I noticed that all of these games did not load quickly, and it was obvious they were extremely dirty. Some were so bad that the q-tips I used to clean them ended up with jet black tops from all the dirt. There's no way that anyone tested them recently, and there's also no way that they had been cleaned at all.

It is not just small sellers who are openly lying to their customers. I recently purchased roughly 12 games from a larger website that specializes in old school gaming, but the majority of the cartridges were dirty, including a few that were a major hassle to take the time to clean. It is clear that these stores intentionally lie so that you will make a purchase with them, and they'll face the customer service consequences later on.  They hope that you'll just clean the cartridge yourself without complaining, and you'll likely have the game up and running within a few minutes. This is a despicable form of false advertising, and as someone who sells items on eBay and Amazon, it feels like a crooked way to run a store.


Please heed the warning of this blog post: if you find yourself buying old NES carts online, basically ignore the term "clean and tested" until a seller has proven to you that they are really doing it.