"The Value of Failure".
The Red Ring of Death, or "three reds" commonly known to domestic players, refers to a fault signal that appears on the Xbox 360 console, which is manifested as the red light of three-quarters of the start button of the game console is lit at the same time, and the machine cannot run.
Just like that
The reason why it is called the "red ring of death" is because once this happens, it almost indicates that your machine will die at the hardware level. It was a nightmare for all Xbox 360 players and brought Xbox one of the most calamitous crises of all time, causing more than $1 billion in financial damage.
But just today, Microsoft officials made a poster of this painful memory, listed for $25 to sell to the public, and also paired two clips on the schematic diagram, as if to intimately tell buyers to hang it on their own wall.
What made Microsoft suddenly choose to "bravely face failure" was a documentary officially released on Youtube by Xbox yesterday. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of the original Xbox, and the official has been doing publicity activities with great fanfare since November, first the 20th anniversary limited controller that was snatched up in the early morning of November 1, and then the global limited 100-copy anniversary limited host jointly signed with the famous Italian luxury brand Gucci, and this documentary is also part of the anniversary event.
The documentary is called "Power On: The Story of Xbox", a total of six episodes, intended to share xbox years of development with players at this special point in time, and the "Death Red Ring" major public relations accident occupies a full episode of more than forty minutes. In the film, the technicians behind the scenes come to the front of the stage and finally have the opportunity to expose this old scar to the players.
Because of the development process, the technicians only got the CPU 9 months before the game console went on sale. The development time was compressed by half, but the time to market could not be pushed back, making the entire process of development, testing and production very hasty, which became the biggest hidden danger later.
The disaster occurred six months after the xbox 360 was released, when the 360 was just like the sun, occupying half of the console market with a lower price than the PS3, better network quality, and a stronger game lineup.
But one day, player complaints suddenly became more and more numerous, and the number of machines that failed multiplied, making the Xbox 360's red ring failure known for a while.
In the original design, the halo of the boot key was used as a player indicator, but also as a guide to machine problems. The death ring in the design means that the core numbers are faulty, in addition to the game will be stuck, the machine can not control the normal operation, but also may inexplicably start to burn.
The official decision was made to replace all the players who had failures with new machines to solve the problem, but the good timing, the enthusiasm of the players, and the accumulated reputation were all exhausted at this time, not to mention that the new machines sent back would not last long before they would fail again. For a time, the entire Internet was full of angry players, and more and more people chose to take videos of smashing game consoles, but what was worse was that for a long time, technicians had not found the problem.
Image credits from the Xbox documentary
In the end, they found that the cause of the accident was that the player would switch the machine on and off frequently, and the material used to connect the CPU would quickly lose its support in the constant cold and heat, and eventually fall off and cause the machine to collapse. If this is to be completely solved, it would be necessary to recycle all players' machines, at least $1.1 billion.
In the second half of the documentary, they tell how they got out of failure. Microsoft invested a huge amount of money to show its sincerity to players, coupled with the successive debut of high-quality games on xbox 360, making this console finally save the bad situation and become a generation of consoles full of memories for many players.
This image made into a poster is the cover of this episode of the documentary. In fact, Microsoft makes a poster for each episode to sell on its official website, but a story of failure is always the most eye-catching, provided that you finally succeed.