Anyone ever have a Sega brand joystick extension cable just die?

[eightbit]

Because of where my consoles are I have to use joystick extension cables for some of them. I have two of the official Sega Genesis (Sega brand) extension cables that I have been using for some time. I played a few Genesis games using it just this morning. I figured I'd use it with my Colecovision today and connected it. I noticed right away that the keypad on the Colecovision controller connected to it would not work, but the actual joystick and fire button did work fine. At first I thought it was a dead keypad, but no. I removed the extension cable and connected the Coleco controller directly to the console and it worked fine.

 

At this point I chalked it up to perhaps the extension cable just doesn't work with the Colecovision.....although I recalled using them with the console in the past. I then plugged it back into the Genesis and this is where it got weird. I have an Everdrive connected and as soon as the menu came up the Everdrive just started blinking like crazy. The controls were all messed up. Down was up, UP was down, start button didn't work. So, I removed the extension cable and connected the Genesis controller directly. And it works fine.

 

So something happened to this extension cable. Inspecting the cable does not show any type of damage. It looks fine. The ports on both consoles are fine and work fine with directly connected controllers.

 

This is just the weirdest thing. I am baffled. Anyone have any clue as to what happened here?