This is certainly one of the most bizarre occurences I've ever had with a game. When I started my NES collection, the first game I looked into getting was Contra. Luckily there was a copy right there at the place where I picked up my NES. It looked very dirty, and had sawdust on the connectors, but I knew I could probably clean it all off. I took it home, eager to set up my NES and play some Contra, it was a game I hadn't played in years and I was excited to be playing it. When I got home I cleaned the game until the connectors were shiny enough to blind a man. I put the game in and it didn't work, as expected. I tried again and the same thing happened over and over. All I could get all day was a blinking grey and black screen, meaning the game wasn't even being detected by the NES. This went on all week, as my frustration mounted. The closest the game came to working was sometimes I would get a screen with a few colors, and when I pushed reset it would go back to blinking on and off. I finally set it aside, and focused on my other games, going back to it periodically over the months to try and get it working again, nothing I did ever worked.

Then one day I heard that soaking the connectors in lemon juice works very good for cleaning NES games. Of course I tried this to Contra for a few hours, and when it didn't work after that I was on the brink of going insane. Then I noticed something, something very wierd. The screws holding the cart together weren't the normal type of screws in an NES cart. They were common household screws, someone had evidently opened the game up somehow. I unscrewed every part of it and when I opened it up, I noticed the entire board inside was broken off, the connectors being the only part still intact. I flipped over the other side to get a look of the inside of the cover, and there were the words "Fuck You" written in black marker. Why this had to happen to my favorite game, I don't know. I think it may be some sort of curse, put on me by my old copy of Contra for giving it up. I couldn't find a working copy of Contra, keep in mind one of the most common games ever, for a full year after I started collecting NES. It can't be a coincidence.