TIL Nintendo coats all of their Switch cartridges with extremely bitter denatonium benzoate to deter children from putting them in their mouths and swallowing them.

Many battery manufacturers do this with CR disc shaped batteries as well.
- Interestingly, this coating can cause issues for some products like the Apple AirTags. I know this because I used one of these batteries with a bitterest in the AirTag on my keys and the AirTag didn’t work.
  
  And what’s funny is that the solution is to lick the coating off either sides of the battery to get them to work.

This could probably be used to check for authentic game cartridges. I'm not going to be licking used games to find out if they're real, though.
- Coward.

I can't believe I'm going to get up, find a cartridge, and lick it after posting this. Damn you.
Edit: It's true.

I've known about this for years, and I'm still convinced that in a few years time you're going to see collectors and/or used game store clerks going "Ah see this one is valuable because it's got the bittering agent still intact. It hasn't all been licked off."

The ultimate gamer high is to take a deep breath from the Steam Deck exhaust, lick a Switch cartridge, hold your breath, and then chug down a G Fuel.
- This is peak gamer. I am in awe.

I got my unsuspecting 10 year old to lick one of those just to see if the Internet was lying to me. It was as easy as "hey Nintendo made those cartridges bitter....you should lick it to see." Lol
- You are a terrible parent and also I hope you took a video and put it up on YouTube... because my kid is 14 and I won't be able to convince her.
  
  Lmao. Nope they did it too fast and without hesitation. I didn't have a chance and once the jig was up it was too late to try again.
- Don't tempt me with a good time. I think that's a teenage party trick. I might need to wait a couple years. He's still kinda a wuss.

All launch copies of Breath of the Wild have been licked. It's a rite of passage. (They taste worse than you'd think they would.)
- Hah ! That means I own the only unlicked launch copy of BotW in the world ! DM me your offers, starting at $1 million, serious people only, I know what I have /s
  
  I have another one unlicked, I accept $750.000.

Also called Bitrex, that stuff does leave an awful taste. Gets used as a denaturant in ethanol to keep people from drinking it. Company I worked at long ago had a stock of it, and our lab had to requalify it for use every 2 years. As careful as we were keeping it contained, it had a way of spreading everywhere. For the next two days everyone who worked in the area would randomly get that awful taste I their mouth.

But how do I remove the coating so I can chew on my switch cartridges?
- Sulfuric acid.

Either mine don't have the coating, or I'm immune to it somehow.
- I finally tried licking one recently, and it didn't taste like anything
  
  Did you buy it used?
- I read somewhere that they stopped doing it. Not sure how often this happened or if it even happened to every game.

I remember this being a whole challenge. I remember licking one and being unimpressed. Pretty sure most people were exaggerating how bad it was.
- It's not like "oh dear God" levels of bitter but it's enough to just be like "pteh ew" and spit it out.