Have any of your older consoles/discs/cartridges stopped working due to old age/randomly?

I know recently they were talking about how Atari cartridges will soon start to degrade and no longer work.

A few SNES games have stopped working of mine but that’s because I never really took care of them. They were loosely stored away in a dusty cupboard.

C64 cassette tapes would often cease to function.

@vagrantsnow: I've never heard of C64. Lol

Computer from the 80s. Games came on old cassette tapes. It was not wholly uncommon for a tape to degrade to the point of being unusable :P

Some disc games like sega saturn and ps1 can get disc rot and quit working. I have about 800 games and I've only had 1 game quit working it was Super Metroid. Eventually with snes and nes games the batteries can die. If that happens a new one needs to be soldered on. None of my PS1 games have stopped working that I know of.

@jdc6305: That's good to hear. I've heard horror stories of people buying PS1 games brand new off of Ebay for expensive prices, only to find that they don't work anymore. Crazy right? lol I guess the sellers didn't store them properly.

Some old AMIGA games didn´t work anymore when I tried to play them 2 months ago. No more Alien Breed II, no more Turtles the Coin-Op wwwhiiiineee! Ebay prices rocketed over the years when it comes to Amiga games.

@Cravenraptor: Considering some of the prices people list these games for too. Ughhhh.

@spacepilot05665: Oh man, that truly sucks.

My SegaCD scratches games, making a ring around the inner area. Looks to me like the spindle sits too close to the bottom tray or maybe the spring holding the top of the CD down is too weak to hold the CD flat. Though I think it's due to poor design and not old age. My PS1 eventually stopped spinning discs. Everything else seemed to work but the disc would never spin.

@pimphand_gamer: I’ve had my PS1 since 1999 I believe. Works fine but I just don’t have any games for it anymore. Lol. Haven’t tested it out in over a year now.

lost count of how many dreamcasts have randomly stopped working, normally different issues each time.

Gameboy games run on some sort of battery, or at least some of them do? Anyway, both of my Pokemon Silver and Pokemon Gold games eventually lost all saved data and became unable to create new saves. My Pokemon Emerald and/or Pokemon Sapphire both have some sort of warning about their batteries. My saves are still there the last time I checked, but I forget exactly what the low battery limits.

Other than that... nope. I still have N64 cartridges from between 15-20 years ago that still work.

Oh, forgot about consoles. My PS3 started having trouble reading discs several years ago. It mostly pertains to blu-ray movies and games with dual-layered discs. I have to go through this ridiculous ritual of tilting my system back until it eventually reads the disc, sometimes after several tries. Never really wanted to try getting it fixed, but I haven't attempted to use the sort of discs it has trouble reading in a long time anyway.

@SoNin360: Man your PS3 issue sounds like a real pain.

@SoNin360: Yeah I had 2 PS3's die because the blu ray quit reading discs. Cigarette smoke and dust are PS3 killers. Also finger prints on the disc can cause it to freeze and lead to system crashes. Some games like Skyrim were extremely buggy and caused crashs. Crashes would corrupt the hard dive. There's a bunch of things. I killed my First two PS3's but my 3rd I put thousands upon thousands of hours on it. I put 2000 hours alone into mw2. If you have a PS3 and it's crashing it's best to use the rebuild data base feature.

@jdc6305: Damn. That's all I can say. Lol

Anything that's ever died on me, died within the first few years. A few Atari games, phat NES, a few PS1s, PS2s, my first PS3. However, anything that's lasted 5+ years or so is still going. My Atari 2600, slim NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, my various Gameboys, etc. all work just fine.

Most of the old save batteries still work, too. Only Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 completely died on me, but I rebought the games used some years later and those ones still work. FF1 still works. All SNES and GBA batteries still work, as far as I know. I replay most of them periodically.

That reminds me that my PS3 crashed one time and I had to restore it, which of course wiped all my data. Fortunately, I'm very good at regularly backing up my saves so I didn't lose any save files. My PS3 mostly gets used for streaming shows and movies now, but I'm a bit surprised that it's still going after all it's been through. It's one of the "fat" models, but fortunately not any of the ones that especially had problems.

I think my PS4's disc drive may be about to crap out on me. It stopped playing Blu Ray movies (without skipping or stuttering) about a year ago. And while my older game discs still run fine, I just bought a newer game this past September (Dragon Quest 11) and the game wouldn't run. I had to download the digital version in order to play the game.

Part of the reason why I haven't gotten Red Dead Redemption 2 yet. I have a feeling that the disc drive won't be able to handle it. And I'm not really wanting to do a 100-something GB download.

@MrGeezer: Yeah man my PS4 has seen some battles too. I think my disc drive is failing out on me slowly also. It still reads but there's a whole lot of screen tearing that comes along with it. Both from movies and games. Only started happening in the last year or so too. Might upgrade to the PS4 Pro but who knows.

@eelfnfhfh: Arigatou. Lol

Kirby Superstar and Stunt Race FX cartridges died on me. Thus far no systems have died yet.

I had Ghost'n Goblins *** original cartidge. A few years ago I wanted to sell it, but it was broken :/

Not the games themselves but my first red Wii I got in 2010 would freeze at certain points and it wasn’t the disc, because other Wii’s would play it fine. I had about 3 different Wii’s once that tore up, yet was really sad because it was my first TV game console

due to old age: probably just my 10,000RPM HDD and my old laptop.

The HDD was approaching 12 years old and was the main drive in its 3rd PC. it would just randomly sieze up though and disc scans were showing more and more bad sectors. So end of the road for that. it owed me nothing though in fairness.

Then there was my old laptop. Similar story: it was over a decade old and something on the motherboard just crapped out. It could have been a simple fix to get it up and running again but at that stage running windows Xp and low resource linux distros (thank god for those) was about the best it could do. So no point putting more money into it.

console/handheld wise i dont think anything has gone for me due old age. If there was an issue with the system it would generally expose itself within a year.

It's going to happen. Batteries die and leak acid if not replaced, connector corrode, capacitors leak. Pro tip: if you own a Turbo Duo/Turbographx 16, send it to a shop to have the capacitors replaced, or they will destroy the mainboard.