Retro Gaming Hats

Retro gaming has its own folk rituals, and most of them were never written down by the companies that made the hardware. Everybody blew on the NES cartridge, and an AnandTech forum thread is full of people who did it as six-year-olds. Nintendo's own manual warned against it, since the moisture in your breath can corrode the pin connectors, and Mental Floss reports that the real fix was pulling the cartridge out and putting it back in. Arcade machines had a ritual too: Atari's Steve Calfee says high score initials were limited to three letters to keep obscenities off the attract screen, which is why a set of initials on the board still counts as a small piece of local fame. These retro gaming hats put that shared memory on a dad hat. RETRO GAMER and OLD SCHOOL GAMER are the plain badges for anyone who searches for them; both phrases already sell elsewhere. The sentence designs carry the cartridge blow, the Konami code, INSERT COIN, PRESS START, the initials that are still on the high score, the proud claim of beating every game without the internet, and a NINTENDO 64 KID badge. BLOW ON THE CARTRIDGE and the Konami code each get a second colorway. Collectors are paying real money for the era, too: a factory-sealed 1986 NES Deluxe Set sold for $120,000. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Give one to the friend with a shelf of cartridges.