Current Events > Did anyone ever rub washing powder into their Gameboy games to glitch them

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm like 98% sure this was never actually a thing, and a handful of trolls in the Pokemon community tried to get a bunch of kids to fuck up their game cartridges by rubbing washing powder into them.

Here's the context:

Back when I was a kid, I got super into glitching Pokemon. Gen 2 was the best for this, it had the easiest cloning glitch in the series and it was easy to fuck everything up and corrupt your game.

I ate that shit up. It was like watching this game world I had adored for years unravel at the seams, and I wanted to go deeper. So I would go online and look up Pokemon Crystal glitches, like things that people had done and how they did it.

For example, there's an item called Teru-sama. You can only get it by glitching the game, you could sell it for a stupidly specific amount like 64,382 dollars, and - if you got the right one - it had the same item ID as the apricot that Kurt turns into the GS Ball, meaning that you could legitimately catch Celebi in an English version of the game. Here's a Bulbapedia article about it: https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Teru-sama

Strategies were mostly the same: clone your Pokemon until something goes horribly wrong, which was literally just a matter of time because something would go horribly wrong if you cloned the same Pokemon over and over. Other strategies involved cart-tilting, which never worked for me because knocking the game out of the pins would freeze everything.

But I came across a couple of different threads where people were saying they glitched their games and got some really unpredictable results after rubbing washing powder into the connector pins on the bottom of the cartridge. The idea was that because washing powder was slightly corrosive, and because the gritty texture would let you scratch the connector pins, it would fuck with the pins in a way that made the game playable but extremely fucked up. It was physically damaging the game in the hopes of getting corruptions that went above and beyond. High risk, high reward.

I don't know if this was ever some sort of common practice that anyone else has ever heard of, and I've been thinking about it lately so I thought I'd make a thread. Again, I seriously doubt this was a thing.

I dont think washing powder is a thing sounds made up

One time my sonic advance 2 game glitched and allowed me to play as Amy despite not having accomplished the prerequisites to unlock her. I wonder if it related to the cartridge pins being dirty in just the right way