So often you will find old consoles and games that have someones name written on them in permanent marker. Luckily this marker isn't as permanent as the manufacturer would like you to believe and can be removed with a couple simple products that can be purchased at a local grocery store.

You will need the following products:

• Q-Tips
• soft Tooth Brush or other soft brush
• Isopropyl Alcohol 95% or higher
• 3M Alcohol wipes (Optional)
• Coconut Oil

Alright so hear me out. There seems to be 2 types of permanent marker out there. The first type is going to need some serious elbow grease, and I suspect is the marker that you will find on all older consoles/games, say from the NES/SNES/N64 Era. This marker is much harder to remove and it will take gentle scrubbing and multiple applications of Isopropyl with Q-Tips to fully remove. The second type is much easier to remove, a dab of Coconut Oil, use your finger to gently scrub and within about 10 seconds its removed and then you can wipe the residual oil off the game cart/console or if you have is disassembled you can wash it with some soap and water.

Here is an example... I purchased a couple Pokemon games from Japan. They have permanent marker on the back. The coconut oil didn't work on these, so I had to resort to scrubbing with a tooth brush and using Q-Tips to wipe the marker away. Now if you are interested the Japanese text on these carts read as "Tagato" and "Takato Nika". Put simply they are someones name. Which is what you will likely find on 99% of the consoles/carts.


After scrubbing with a soft tooth brush and using Isopropyl Alcohol 100% it took about 3-4 minutes per cart and we see that the permanent marker is 100% removed on the left cart and the right cart is very close to being 100% removed. The best part about using this method is that the carts won't be damaged further during the cleaning process.