Cleaning Up an Old Super NES

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

At some point in my adult life, I came into possession of a Super NES. I don’t remember the details of who gave it to me, or why, but I was happy to take it. The Super NES I worked so hard for in the summer of 1991 was long gone, and my life had been sadly bereft of my all-time favorite Nintendo console, so I was more than happy to take it, even with a fine layer of crud attached.

That’s one thing about living in a small town and being known as “the guy who likes video games.” People would contact me after cleaning out their house, or before they went to the e-waste center, to offer me their junk. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” they say, and it’s very rare for me to turn down someone’s trash.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” they say, and it’s very rare for me to turn down someone’s trash.

Anyway, none of that is important! What’s important is I have a Super NES, and up until very recently, it was kind of gross. Not impossibly so, but it could use a good disassembling and cleaning, which is exactly what I did in the video above. I also needed to remove a coin that was trapped inside, placed there at some point by one of my kids. I don’t know why they put a coin in it, they’d never even been to an arcade at that point, and it didn’t make much sense, but children are unbound by worries such as that, and so a coin found its way inside, and stayed there for years.

It was a quarter by the way. Cha-ching!

Cleaning up a Super NES is a lot easier than you think, as it doesn’t require special screwdrivers or really anything you (probably) don’t already have in your junk drawer. I was lucky with this particular unit, because while it was dirty, it wasn’t “rescued from a landfill” dirty, and the components inside were completely free of moisture damage or corrosion.

This was about as straight-forward of a restoration as I could have asked for. There’s no yellowing on the case, either, which was great. There’s some debate about the long-term effects of retro-brighting yellowed plastics, and thankfully I got one of the ones from a batch of ABS that didn’t turn into that sickly yellowish tinge of so many electronics of the era.

If you like watching old stuff get brought back to showroom-fresh, or as close as possible at least, you should definitely check out This Old Tech here on IGN and on the IGN YouTube channel. I have a whole basement full of junk in various states of repair, and this is a new show we’re doing where I take you through the process of cleaning, repairing, and waxing nostalgic about all kinds of old stuff, from consoles and games to vintage audio.

Seth Macy is Executive Editor, IGN Commerce, and just wants to be your friend. You can find him hosting the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast.