“In the middle of the game, slowly and surely wiggle the cartridge.”

(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…