I had a cocker spaniel that would kick his feet really fast when he got excited, and one day just happened to be lying in front of the NES when something incited the furious leg-kicking. Unfortunately my Legend of Zelda never played quite right after that. We prayed to the video game gods, tried repeatedly to put it in the machine in just the right way, but to no avail. There was nothing to do but let that second quest go unfinished, and forever wonder if there was a third...
It was also rumored that one of my friend's cartridges was ruined by this guy named Tyrone licking it when he had a mouthful of fried chicken, and that if you put the cartridge in the machine just right a piece of chicken would appear on the screen. I could never figure out how that worked.
Oh, I did this a LOOOONG time ago, but I remember. It was with Final Fantacy, Mystic Quest.
I liked the music in it, so I opened up the cartridge and tried to take out the sound chip and switch it with a game that had a soundtest (I know I was stupid) It will still run, but very difficult to get going.
I realized it was a bad idea before I tried to open up the other game tho.
I'm proud to say all my NES cartridges are in perfect working order.
I've melted a few audio cassettes in my day though from leaving them on the car dashboard.
I let my friend borrow my Sega Mega Drive when I was a kid. We played Michal Jackson's Moonwalker an entire evening. When I got back to him the next day, the cartridge would not work. Probably my friend got angry and threw it in the wall, without causing any outer damage to it. I still got that cartridge, allthough I bought a new copy of it two years ago or something like that.
Might be fixable, but I haven't checked. I never allowed him to borrow more stuff from me anyways.
I haven't ruined any cartridges, but my old dog chewed up my turbo controller's end, so I couldn't beat Blaster Master after that without a game genie.
No lost cartridge stories, but I've got two lost CD stories.
One was simply that the CD fell onto the floor and our mom accidently dropped a chair onto it. Goodbye, The Incredible Toon Machine. (One of the bigger woes of cleaning.)
The other was very interesting and I'm not even sure how it could happen. A friend was playing Monkey Island 3 with one of our disks on one of our computers. I don't recall if the game stopped working or what, but we decided we needed to eject to disk. Well, we didn't get a disk, but rather many many many bits and pieces of a disk. Other than a couple of pieces "gumming" up the drive, the drive opened pretty normally.
We were lucky that this was one of those games that you have two of because your parents accidently bought an extra one.
(In any case, to this day I still don't know what would cause a CD to *shatter* while in a drive. Even the CD mom dropped a chair on was in bigger pieces. CDs that I break I can only break in half, and just barely. At best I suspect it had something to do with temperature or a somehow super-duper-really-incredibly-badder-than-bad CD.)
>In any case, to this day I still don't know what would cause a CD to *shatter* while in a drive.
It can't be that uncommon. I've heard several stories like this.
I've had some PC games flat out disappear (box, cd, booklets), to this day I have no idea where they went. Probably my brothers ate them or something. And a joystick controller for my Mega Drive, where the stick broke in half. The guy in the store claimed he had never seen anything like it, but I'm not sure I believe that.
MythBusters did a show on it once. They got it to happen at extremely high speeds - the spin speed made the CD wobble past its structural limit and it shattered.
someone is out there who will like you. take off your mask so they can find you faster.
I support the new Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun.
I once accidentally threw a CD into a jade statue. The statue resonated like a tuning fork and the CD shattered into a billion pieces like safety glass. I've never been able to get a CD to break into more than a few pieces before or since then, and I've never been able to get the statue to resonate like that again when struck, either. Very strange!
Joined: 4/8/2005
Posts: 1573
Location: Gone for a year, just for varietyyyyyyyyy!!
One of my friends got his NHL-97 shattered like that. He had played several hours in a row and the game started behaving very strangely. It was a hardcore bugfest. For example, some sound files were messed up so that the commentator talked nonsense. It was still very playable. Then the disc died.
Somewhat like my Perfect Dark cartridge. It used to randomly hide save files and switch the music for no reason. Now it just doesn't list any files and says that it's full. It still randomly malfuncts in random ways altough I think some are normal bugs.
Fifa 97 (96? 98?) for the SNES did the same at times, names and pretty much everything got switched every once in a while.
SNES controllers seem pretty good at not getting damaged. I threw one against the wall so many times but it still works. Surprising.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
lmao ruining cartridges can't mean "good story". so i'll tell how i lost some games here they are very sad stories! yea they all involve lending too...
When we had atari we would trade games a lot (just borrowed, but it was a rule to borrow that it would need to be in trade fashion, and a trade of same weight). well, there was this guy in school, much much older than me that showed this atari cartridge it was the circuit thing only, no plastic case. And he told me it had 10 games in it. He pointed at the connectors and counted 10. See? 10 games! so i wanted to trade with him i lend him 10 of my cartridges. Ok i never say my cartridges again and was stuck with a missile command single game cart... ¬¬
Another story i trade my NES with many many games with a friend who had a brand new mega drive with sonic, castle of illusion, strider and alex kidd. That was a fair trade :) i played the thing to exaustion then we would give our things back. But he didn't want to give me back my battletoads. He was being childish and started to run with my battletoads in his hands and i chased him then he fell to the ground and used my cartridge to protect his hands. It was messy and did some damage :S he realized what he did and gave it back to me. Luckly it still works as of today!
Now with a playstation CD... I had this cd bag/case thing which i could put 10 cds in. So i had it with like 20 cds in and it was closed. Pretty stuffed. I was at a friend's house and the case was in the bed. He accidentaly sat on it... My ff8 last cd got a fissure in the middle of it... I'm glad it was pirated.