Xbox 360 lead calls Red Ring of Death “Tylenol moment”
You may not have seen it if you’re a new Xbox player or teenager, but long-time fans of the 25-year-old Microsoft will remember the infamous “Ring Ring of Death” from the Xbox 360 era in the mid-2000s.
This infamous hardware problem became ubiquitous shortly after the console’s launch in 2005, and is thought to have been caused by overheating that interfered with connecting the system’s motherboard to its GPU, leading to failure. When this happened, the Xbox 360’s green light would flash an ominous red, and it would no longer be usable.
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If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering what Moore might mean by calling the sudden appearance of the Red Ring of Death releasing a “Tylenol moment.” Thankfully, he was quick to explain the true meaning of that term, and how Microsoft is committed to doing right by every player affected by the design feature.
“From the point of view of what happened at that time, if you remember … that terrible night in Chicago when some incredible person put cyanide in Tylenol on the drugstore shelf, and people who took Tylenol that night died,” Moore said. “The reason I’m calling time on Tylenol is Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, went out of business within two hours and said, ‘take every part of our product off the shelf and destroy it, and we’ll find out what’s going on here.’
“I’ve always looked at that as a marketer as emphasizing, ‘we’re not going to make excuses, we’re not going to dilly-dally, we’re actually going to do what’s right for the consumer right away.’ So I called the Red Rings of Death a moment of Tylenol,” he continued. “What we’ve had to do for every affected player is we’ll put in a box with a return label overnight, a custom-made box that you can put your Xbox 360 in … and we’ll either fix it or send you a new one via FedEx again.”
This is exactly what Microsoft is doing as it works to fix the issue with the Xbox 360 design that caused the Ring of Death in the first place. The whole process cost the company a whopping $1.15 billion, but Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO at the time, approved the plan without a second thought to keep the Xbox brand in consumer systems.
“Yes, when we collected all that, it was $1.15 billion, I had to go and see. [Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO] and he says, ‘Look, this genre is going to die if we don’t do this, and I think we have a great opportunity to make this a great form of entertainment, and Microsoft needs this badly.’ He said, ‘What will it be?’ … I said it would be $1.15 billion. He said, ‘Do it.’
It should go without saying that Microsoft is making the right move; The Xbox 360 ended up being a huge success for the company and its brand of games, but the business wouldn’t have gone under if Microsoft didn’t have them and get things right.
🗨️ Have you ever found the Red Ring of Death?
The Ring of Death became such an unpopular part of Xbox history, that Microsoft even sold a poster that referenced it a few years ago. If you own or own an Xbox 360, I’m curious: have you ever been affected by The Ring of Death yourself? If so, did Microsoft fix it for you without a problem? Let me know in the comments, and vote in the poll below.
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