What's What! Video Game Facts (71/365)

The Xbox 360 was developed by Microsoft and launched worldwide November 22, 2005 as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles, competing against the incredibly successful Nintendo's Wii and the disastrous Sony's PlayStation 3. The second generation console created by microsoft sold much better than its predecessor, and although not the best-selling console of the seventh generation, the truth the innovation of the Wii surprised everyone, it was regarded as a success since it strengthened Microsoft as major force in the console market as the highest-selling console made by an American company.

After a few weeks of its launch to the company, some customer reports began to arrive, in the reports mentioned that the console works like 15 minutes, shortly after the image of the game was frozen. This was how begins what would later be called by users like The Red Ring of Death or RRoD, a technical problem that some of the xbox 360 models suffered at the beginning represented by a series of glowing red lights flashing on the face of the console, whose consequences was that the console was disabled to read the discs or that it scratches them.

Microsoft has not released its official statistics on the failure rate of the various versions of the console and even has never officially released any information indicating the true cause of the problem, but it was rumored about one billion dollars in repairs. That's not to mention the cost of image for the company.

I remember when we bought this console, the xbox 360 was the last console that I managed to have, and when we found out about this error, the imported products really take a little longer to arrive, so we had no idea of this failure, so it was a terror at first to play with the xbox 360 after learning about this failure, there were many myths, but after finding out what were the Xenon and Falcon model the most affected and confirming that ours was from the Jasper generation, the one that had the Microsoft corrections, it really was a relief but always fear seeing those three rings.

I think it all happened because Microsoft was in a hurry to launch the console before Playstation 3 in addition to wanting to save a few million designing it own graphics chips. Maybe if the company had entrusted this work to companies such as NVIDIA or AMD, it would have saved many problems.