Luigi's Mansion 3 Somehow “Killed” a PS5 Disc Drive in a Switch Cartridge Stunt

A father with several children discovered his PS5 disc drive had suddenly failed—and the problem was not a dead drive at all. After his kids complained that the console would no longer take discs, he opened it up himself and found the drive packed with a whole row of Nintendo Switch game cartridges, enough to completely jam the mechanism. The games specifically mentioned included Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Spyro.

He later shared the experience on Reddit, where the post quickly picked up thousands of upvotes. The community responded exactly the way the internet usually does: part amused, part merciless. One joke framed it as children “testing how strong the legendary cross-platform feature really is.”

What makes the story land so well is how familiar its logic feels. This was not a hardware failure, and it was not Sony or Nintendo somehow slipping up. The real cause was that very childlike chain of reasoning: if they are all games, why shouldn’t they go in? To an adult player, that is obvious. To a child, it can look like an untested hidden function. The shock comes from thinking the machine is broken, then opening it and realizing the machine was never the real problem.

That is also why the story spread so easily. It has nothing to do with performance arguments or spec-sheet wars. It taps into a fear that almost any family with kids—or really anyone who has kept a console at home—can understand immediately: the machine says nothing, but inside it has already been “modified.” So the comments turned into a joke factory. Another user dryly called it “proof that Mario and Luigi run on PS5 after all—Nintendo lost this round.”

From a player’s perspective, it is also a useful reminder. If you have both a PS5 and a Nintendo Switch at home, and younger children around, it is probably unwise to leave the console somewhere that invites experimentation. A disc slot especially can look like an open invitation. Explaining early that discs and cartridges are not the same thing is much cheaper than opening up the system later and trying to save it.

This is not major industry news, but it is a perfect piece of gaming-life black comedy: Sony hardware, Nintendo cartridges, and Reddit turning the whole absurd scene into a widely shared punchline. Luigi’s Mansion 3, a game already known for mixing cute and creepy, ended up giving a PS5 its own ridiculous little scare sequence.

The most unsettling part, though, is not the image itself. It is the sudden realization that the scariest enemy a home console may face is neither hardware limits nor scalpers, but a pair of small hands driven by curiosity.