Do Game Cartages Eventually Die?

Ive had a Sega Genesis and NES for 9 years or so now. Will the cartages eventually stop working? How about CDs or recent cartage based systems like DS?

My guess is they might, but my Super Mario World has been going strong for about two decades now. None of my carts have ever failed and I've been gaming all my life and about 30 years old. I wouldn't worry about carts.

Haha, a lot of people say they will, but I still have an old Atari 2600 (A lot of people do, actually) and the games still work fine.

I'd say your best bet would be to do a bit of research on what you need to clean the games and keep them maintainted. I went to nintendorepairshop.com and got all the stuff I need to clean out my games and my 8-bit NES. My NES literally works flawlessly now.

By the way, never buy games at nintendorepairshop.com! $10 for a copy of the first Mario Bros. game! I know many shops that GIVE that game away...

I've had a lot of my old cart games for years... since the 16 bit days. and i can honestly say, i've never had to replace a cartridge. consoles fail more than the carts, I find. I've replaced my SNES and MD a few times. but never the games.

I still have original save games on SMW2:yoshi's island, Secret of Mana, Story of Thor, SMW and others.

The only cart I've EVER had trouble with was a 3rd party Memory cartridge for the Saturn. but, I got a !st party one ssoon after and never had a problem since.

Sorry if this is irrelevant but if you have 2nd and 3rd generation Pokemon carts. They'll eventually die out as the internal battery would run out and the games won't be able to run properly as the clock/time feature is a massive aspect of those games.

Everything will stop working at some point. All those cd's, dvds, and blurays only last a century. Cartridges will last much less.

So all those games everyone collects (including me) will be total trash down the road.

Lots of cartridges have batteries in them for saving, and those batteries will eventually die out.

Like everyone pretty much said, the info on the cart itself should last a good long time but the battery that most old carts use will die out sooner or later. However, if you know the where and how you can buy the stuff to replace them. I believed they used to sell Game-bit battery tool kits for just this reason but since discs have take over the gaming industry, I haven't seen them around. I imagine you can still pick up all the things you need to do it yourself though.