The Most Expensive Mistake In Video Game History 

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I was 13 and my mom drove me to a GameStop in our mall that was 30 min away to get an Xbox. I set it up as soon as I got home only for it to immediately have a red ring. Had to wait a week for my mom to drive me back to the mall to replace it. The hype of finally having one followed by the disappointment of it not working cannot be understated

Those low res clips of people destroying their 360s sure take me back. I was at my cousin's house when his got red ringed. He got pissed, slammed his fist on it a few times, and it just, started working again. It still works to this day. And we still sometimes call him, "The Fonz."

Funny story. Back when this happened I worked at GameStop and was the assistant store manager. The pre-owned system policy allowed us to swap out used game consoles for another used one within 30 days. Since I was the ASM I would swap out my 360 console every time it got the red ring of death. I swapped 13 consoles in one year. Yes the average is more than one a month

The fun part of being a game store manager during this time was that people would hear "red ring of death", and bring their console back when their AV connention was bad, assuming the box was fucked. We would plug the thing in and show them that it worked. They would blame us for wizardry or somw shit and demand their money back. Good times.

I avoided this problem by being too poor to afford current gen

I remember working in the industry, and everyone was absolutely FLOORED by the failure rate. Acceptable failure rates for electronics are -5%. PS3 was 2%. Wii was 1%. Xbox 360 was 33%…

Just to be clear- the solder problem was discovered around 2010 (roughly- its been a long time). MS only confirmed it in 2021.

I fixed hundreds of those. Modded just as many. It wasnt a cold solder issue. The issue was the GPU was held in place by those X springs. The box would get hot and reflow the solder, disconneting the gpu. If you removed the X spring and used nylon bolts and nuts, then reflowed it, it would work forever. Still have a few of them.

Man, all those videos of soldiers on tour blasting their 360’s is like an unlocked memory. Totally forgot about it till seeing it again

You left out the funniest bit: the solder issue was figured out pretty fast not by microsoft, but by gamers. A common 'fix' at the time was intentionally overheating it by wrapping it in towels and blowing hot air through it, or putting it in the oven, or even just opening the thing up and heating up the solder connections directly. The idea was to just get the solder to melt a little and reform the connections. It had a spotty success rate, but it did work sometimes and was a well known 'hack' at the time before microsoft fixed it.

being both from a family with not much money and someone who preferred Playstation anyway and still very much enjoying my PS2, and having Xbox users clown on me for it, then witnessing literally all of them lose their systems to red rings, was the most cathartic experience of my life and nothing will ever surpass that feeling ever again

My favorite part of this was how "red ringed" entered the lexicon. You had nurses saying, "Sorry kids your grandpa red-ringed lol" and kids going "im going to red-ring myself". even my mechanic would tell me "sorry chief the thing's totally red-ringed"

I've never seen that clip of the Sony CEO saying "299", that's actually pretty funny

The guys at my local Game store were absolute legends when I had this problem. They just said "if you buy an extended warranty for £10 I'll take this one off you and give you a brand new one from the back with a 60gb HDD". Heroes Also does anyone else remember those huge fan blocks that plugged in to the back of the 360?

I went through 5 360s it was the only console that i would buy an extended warranty for. The single PS3 i bought still works to this day

I fixed hundreds of these by simply replacing the thermal paste with a silver oxide based paste. I don't know why it took Microsoft an additional 10 years to admit that was the problem.

[I want to say] back in the 2010's, my father was deployed and brought us a Ps3 and Xbox from Iraq and had them shipped over. The Xbox red ringed within a week despite the fact we barely used it, while the Ps3 survived falling down a flight of stairs, getting soggy during a hurricane, having a tv falling on it after the table it and the tv were on broke, AND a short circuit from a malfunctioning surge protector. That thing was a workhorse.

The funny thing is even with the red ring issue players still wanted to play on the console. The games were just that fun. Halo 3, Gears of War etc. A console which was the first to succesfully jumpstart an online multiplayer service where you could link up with friends. The use of LAN as a way to get people connected who didn't necessarily have internet. It was a real love hate relationship. That being said I distinctly remember always having that fear of getting a red ring of death every time I turned my console on but luckily it never came.

There is a group of people that solved this issue. The RROD and the PS3 YLOD were actually the same issue. TSMC was contracted by Nvidia and ATI for the graphics processor. However both sony and microsoft chose to cheap out on the substrate material. The ball grid array that attaches the die to the substrate breaks from thermal cycling (not the BGA that attaches the substrate to the main board.) This is why overheating the consoles works for a short time. If you look at Sony’s console history they redesigned that GPU a few times to address the issue. But they only band-aided the issue until right before the slim came out when they just redesigned the GPU completely.

Dude the red ring was like the defining moment in my childhood that made my mom think I was a wizard. I learned about the towel trick online and roasted my Xbox back to life. when my mom saw it turn on she was like “how?”

My 360 was a real trooper. It was strong and healthy until a year or two after the Kinect released. At that point it developed a strange condition were it would no longer read discs. The remedy was to drum roll right above the disc tray with vigor while it was attempting to read the disc. And if it was being particularly stubborn, I would have to remove the face plate and do it bareback.

3:45 yet the GameCube is the best console ever made, runs still fine after 20 years

Still remember the day my OG 360 got the RROD; playing Zombies on WAW, all of a sudden the picture stops, Xbox turns off; try to turn it on again, boom - weekend destroyed. Kudos to MS still fixing it considering it was late 2008 but that is where I can pinpoint my OCD when it comes to looking after my consoles and keeping them as cool as possible when in use.

In 2006 I was fresh out of college and got my first job in the game industry as a tester for MS up in Redmond. My team were testing Xbox 360 games like Gears of War, Dead Rising, etc. We would constantly report console failures but our reports for hardware issues were ignored. I really wish they had listened to their QA team way back then. Ah well...

Still need to mentally prepare to re-live the red ring trauma but this is definitely going straight into my watch later playlist

I remember my boyfriend at the time had to send his back to the factory to be fixed right after he got it. He was PISSED. He went through Microsoft customer service instead of the retail store, and they sent a box to mail it back and everything. My 360 was fine though. But when I got the 360 S, I had to send that back to be fixed too. The process was really streamlined and communicative though, which was nice.

God, what a time it was. My mom had bought mine in 07 with Halo 3 at Best Buy. The best buy warranty she had bought ran out by 1 month by the time my 360 elite got red ring. I had heard horror stories about people sending their consoles to the repair center, so I took mine to a local game store and paid to have it fixed. 70 bucks and a week later I had my 360 back again.

As someone that did in fact choose a PS3 at launch over the 360 like most of my friends and family....... i did at first feel like the fool........ but then everyone had to buy 2 more 360s while i never had to buy another ps3......... so i did laugh pretty loudly at what can i only describe as Pure Schadenfreude

My red ring experience was surprisingly positive. I bought a used 360 a couple of years after they came out, and it red-ringed about a week into my ownership. Luckily, it just so happened to be whatever the specific type of failure was that they were forced to warranty for three years. So, I paid $100 for a used, 2.5 year-old 360 and wound up getting an essentially brand new one a couple of weeks later.

I was maybe 8 or 9 when my older brother got his white Xbox 360. So many fond memories with that console, countless hours playing split screen Halo Reach. When he moved out to college, he left it with me, and I still play it occasionally today. I’m 24, and I really feel lucky to have a 360 that’s survived this long.

I played the OG Gears of War semi-professionally and went through 9 360’s with the RROD. I was a high school student who had no money, but sold everything I could scrounge (plus a little sponsor money) to buy a second 360 just so I didn’t have downtime. I once got the RROD the same day that I got my 360 back from service! It was a total nightmare

My grandmother found a broken Xbox 360 at a Goodwill. It had a red ring, sent it in and got a new Xbox out of it. Good stuff MS.

What I remember even more than the red ring was that if your friend even bumped the table or your dog or cat touch the 360 it would laser burn a circle on your disc and destroy it. Still incredible memories of tf2, cod4, assassins creed 1, dark souls, gears of war 1, and more for hours and hours lol

Man seeing a almost history video on a console gen i grew up with is surreal, like a weird look back at what still sometimes feels new and current to me

This video brought me back to some of the best parts of my childhood. The PS1 and PS2 were absolute GOAT consoles that carried my childhood. Thankfully when I got an xbox, and all the xbox's I've had since never experienced the red ring of death. Cool video👍

Shockingly, when I eventually got a 360, it was the Halo 3 model. It was shared between me and my 2 stepsiblings and it lasted well into the Elite/Slim's release before finally red ringing; we took it to a Best Buy and the tech there was baffled that it lasted so long with so much use before finally kicking the bucket. Real shame I was never able to get everything off it; lost a lot of custom Halo maps and gamemodes as a result.

Tbf to the PlayStation 3, they still sold more consoles than the Xbox 360 despite people repeat buying the Xbox because of this

I remember going into a FuncoLand and they said they kept having to replace the store console because it would overheat and stop working. Did they not have an emergency poweroff to keep the processor from melting onto the motherboard?

I literally got the red ring of death three times in a row. I sent it in two times, before I just bought a new console, because those return boxes DID take weeks to come! I remember starting to save for a new console after the second occurrence.

Had my 360 for over 10 years , actively played it and was blessed to never be hit with the red ring of death .

I was one of the luckiest 360 owners ever. Got 1 single OG pro model and it somehow lasted several years before finally giving out one day. By that time Microsoft had already gone through the ringer with the 360 failures and had streamlined their repair process. Shipped my console off and got it back with a shiny new Falcon mainboard and it continued on for years after until the disc drive shat the bed

The Gamecube may not have sold well but it was the hardiest little console I've ever owned. Survived a drop onto a hardwood floor and kept working like new for years until I gave it away like an idiot.

Yeah definitely called it: RoHS. The problem isn't just that lead-free solder is inflexible and prone to corrosion (and a phenomenon known as "tin whiskers"), it's that it has different flow characteristics: you can't treat tin solder the same as lead solder because the tin solder requires a longer, higher max temperature flow curve, but too many early adopters of RoHS standards just treated it like lead solder (which used a faster, cooler flow process) and so it didn't flow properly. Also, some of the early tin solder compositions were less than ideal so they'd fail even under ideal flow conditions. This was a huge problem in the mid '00s and into the 2010s, especially noticeable in video cards.

I remember as a little kid hearing all about the RROD from my older sister who had an Xbox 360 when the issues became prominent. I also remember being told that you shouldn’t rest the console on its side, as that would cause the RROD? Perhaps my memory is faulty.

They absolutely knew what was wrong with the console, they didn't care. They thought it was worth releasing it even defective and then just replace them as needed. Their only concern was getting the console out before anyone else.

I remember as a kid I found a method where you shove toothpicks into the grate on the top or bottom (can't remember which) to fix it... And no word of a lie it actually worked for me and fixed my red ring. I put it in on a specific spot and felt something just pop into place it was really weird.

I remember my red ring of death. I was able to fix it using a YT tutorial. It worked great for a few months until I got the 2 red lights of death. This time I couldn’t fix it so I taught it to fly

Great video/mini documentary as always. Although I was waiting for you to mention "The towel trick" 😅 I was curious as to whether it actually worked for anyone 😂

Excellent video! The Xbox 360 became very famous in Latin America and here in Brazil, where there was no service that allowed consoles to be repaired. In this case, we started with non-formal processes, the most famous was "rebailing" which cost almost 70% of the value of the console (which was VERY expensive here) and didn't keep it working for almost 2 months. I used the cheap and so-called "mod-Opalla" on my 360, which consisted of using clips to hold paper with a eraser on one end, pressing the memories onto the board. Almost 20 years later and it still works. PS: The "so-called mod-Opala" had this name because there was a very famous car in Brazil in the 80s and 90s here with this name (it's a "child" of the American Impala), and this car had a problem where the exhaust "hit" the body a lot of the car making an unbearable noise inside the vehicle due to the vibration, and to solve it it was necessary to attach a piece of rubber under the exhaust, holding it in place...yeah, this is Brazil 🤣

You should be proud of that "cut corners in a circle factory joke." Very good

My father bought the house the Xbox 360 a month after it’s release and I was so excited! I remember the first day we set it up, my dad and I played street fighter and halo for hours. This was like a routine for the week that followed up but less than two weeks the red rings plagued us. I tried everything I could find in forums but no help. That was the last time I ever got to play video games with my dad. I will always hate Microsoft for that

Bought a used 360 off a friend about 15 years ago now, regular model, 120 gb hdd module, controller and memory unit for 100 bucks. Ended up running flawlessly all day, every day, grinding on Halo then CoD then Destiny as a NEET for years before the disk drive finally went and it became my RU-vid Xbox. Really felt lucky on that one.

I'm so glad to live somewhere were the warranty is specified by law lol, I would not trust 99% of these corporations to do anything otherwise

The reason for selling the remote control for the original xbox, if I remember right, was because that's how they avoided having to pay the license fee for the MPEG2 decoder on every single xbox, which would have increased costs, so instead the license was attached to the DVD Playback kit (even though the software was already on the hard drive). Pretty sure they were making a loss on those consoles (at least at first), so obviously they didn't want to have to eat the cost for a feature that many people might not have cared about.

The “Red Rings Of Death” was my first introduction to PlayStation. Been rocking with them since.

The red ring of death was a myth to me until around 2015 when my OG Xbox 360 finally red ringed. I was devastated really want another one because id love to play on all my old saves but alas that is a pipe dream for a future date.

In about 2008, all my friends had xbox 360s and I desperately wanted to join them. I asked my dad for one and he said "do you know what a Wii is?" The rest is history.

I bought a 360 floor model from the local Toys R Us for like, $100 below MSRP. Two months later, it red-ringed, and Microsoft replaced it with a brand new one that I still have to this day.

Microsoft watching all the 360s getting destroyed: “Well fuck it, they can’t take it back now”

I loved this video! I was already familiar with the situation behind the XBOX red ring scandal, but you touched upon a lot of different happenings behind it that i havent seen covered in other videos!!! Im new to your channel so im not sure if you've already covered this but Id love to see your take on the failure behind the Sega Saturn as well as the downfall and sorry state KONAMI is in!!! Great channel glad i subbed!!😊😊😊😊

By the way, the towel trick genuinely worked. I had mine RRoD and brought it back to life six times, the trick was to leave it tightly wrapped for about 30 - 45 minutes in a thick towel and then, after unplugging the system, picking it up and dropping (NOT THROWING) it from a distance of about three to four feet directly parallel from the floor on a carpeted/soft surface. My theory, and I have no idea if its real or not I'm beyond caring, was that the RRoD was caused by the system overheating and some chip inside slightly displacing. The heat freed up those slots, and dropping it forced the chip back into place. After I left it unplugged and it cooled down it would work for an average of a couple months to a year or so. By the way, mine still works - six RRoDs later. Lmao, Microsoft, maybe they should've stocked up on some towels!

Dude, at least put an epilepsy warning at 18:38. That was just ridiculous

3:00 YIKES! Was the video researched? The PlayStation could play DVDs. The PS2 had a Blue Ray Player! That was the kicker! A Blue Ray disk would hold 10x more data than a standard DVD. It was also Backwards compatible. Meaning you could still play your PlayStation games, using the old Memory cards. That was a huge selling point back in the days before digital downloads.

Those soldiers shooting their Xbox is the best use of tax payer dollars I’ve seen.

Epilepsy warning at 18:30

So in the early aftermath of the red ring incident I had an... acquaintance who was kind nutty, but great at repairing electronics. He told me that he was certain that it was the solder causing the problems. He claimed Sony had their hands in the creation of laws around lead free solder, using environmental saftey as an excuse, but really it was about planned obsolescence, with Sony knowing the problems with lead free solder cracking, and could more easily design electronics that stop working after 3 years.

Ill never forget my red ring of death. I was playing Battlestations Pacific and I was dive bombing in an SBD Dauntless. Mid dive it all just shut off and when I turned it back on, there it was

In the UK we just used a qtip or a toothpick to block the front fan on 360 to over heat it. Every one seam to know it was a soldering problem

Man the ps3 was that generations Dreamcast. I dropped my ps3 on straight asphalt from about 5 feet. Which landed right on the corner where the power button is. The glass around the power button is cracked, and I can see a bit of the internals. Regardless I have that thing plugged up and it still runs in 2023. These things are honesty the GOAT of consoles IMO

I remember when I was little my dad's xbox got the red ring, and then the next day when I took one of my games to my friends house his Xbox left one of those perfect circle scratches on my disc, the ones that are literally fatal to a disc game. Shit had me tight

I knew about the RRoD as a kid but the only two times I ever encountered it was after my brother spent the whole night grinding through Halo 3 on legendary from like 2pm to 5am....So I just always blamed him for the red ring of death.

I got maybe a year out of mine before it red ringed. It got a workout though. MS replaced it and as I had a launch model, they gave me the newer model with HDMI.

It is interesting it took them so long to admit that it was the lead free solder, there are articles from 2007 that speculate that as the cause and even narrow it down to the GPU. I personally had 5 different 360s over a course of a few years. The last one was an Arcade model and it never failed. I also lost a few games to the disc tray, it would eat them up.

16:26 I'm so glad Captain Dickhead is still getting speaking roles. He's come so far since his start on sleepycast.

I worked as a manager at a Play N Trade during the nightmare that was the RROD…i miss the good ole days:/

I had to send my xbox away twice but since then it has worked pretty much fine since 2012. Opened it up to clean it properly for the first time a few months ago and was surprised to see the motherboard with big fat sticky yellow jizz blobs of soldering flux on it. Now I understand why! Thank you ManyKudos for explaining the sticky off-white liquid in my box.

I had the RRoD 3-4 times. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sitting down after a long work week, expecting to finally game with the boys, and power up to a black screen and red ring.

I almost feel bad my 360 never red ringed. Almost 20 years on and it still works. Hope this doesn't jinx it next time I get nostalgia and try to use it.

I remember the first time I dealt with the red ring of death. I was playing minecraft and all of a sudden my world crashed and I got the stupid red ring. 10 years old me now understood the concept of disappointment

I once went to Lowes and was going through their hardware drawers to get the parts I'd need to fix mine. A clerk came by and, seeing what I already had in my hands, asked if I needed to fix my X-box. I said yes, and he proceeded to pull the rest of the parts for me. He said he had so many people come through for the same thing that he made sure to always have plenty of parts in stock.

16:27 Was not expecting a cameo from captain diqhedd, glad to see he’s still getting work after the sleepy cabin burned to the ground

The soldiers shooting up a 360 really hit me in the nostalgia bone.

I actually wrapped mine in a towel then put it in a freezer for a day. That actually fixed my RROD many times. I never knew about the oven trick and I was too poor to replace it, my dad also told me it wouldn’t be replaced if I broke it. My older sister went through 8 while I was able to revive mine repeatedly until we got a newer black 360 and eventually an Xbox 1.

I went through 14 360s over about a year. They gave me 3 games, a controller and about a few one month cards in total. They would send a box to mail it and once it was shipped they sent me a replacement. One system didn't even work out of the box.

Microsoft's most expensive mistake is literally just buying blizzard

My 360 was on life support for two years with the towel trick. I wrapped it up like a baby and prayed to the MW2 Gods to allow me in the halls of 10th prestige

I remember the solder problem. I also remember people saying if you wrapped your Xbox in a blanket that would solve the issue lol. I just cracked mine open and redid the solder myself and it worked great after

I got the red ring of death once in my whole time having a 360. Weird thing is, it just kinda sorted itself out. I remember being devastated because I was rattling through black flag when it happened. I went out to get some snacks, came back and it was just back to normal like nothing had ever happened.

god it hurts to see the RROD'd xboxes being destroyed when you realize that all it needed was a cpu/gpu reballing

I can remember being in Australia in 2008 and I was the only kid in school who didn’t have a Xbox 360 But by the end of the summer - basically no one at school had one The summer there was on average 40 degrees and stuck inside lots of my friends just played Xbox until the extreme heat fucked their units. Felt pretty good

how am i just finding your channel?! great content, love ur story-telling and awesome choice of topic. liked & subbed

I remember this, I got the red ring of death on my 360 and this is what veered me away from any future XBox consoles. I have my original PS1 and it still works along with my 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Sega's "Nintendon't" ad campaign occurred in mostly 89-91 specifically targeting the obsolete NES. By the time the SNES came out, their ad offensive mostly just highlight the higher clockspeed of its CPU since every other aspect the SNES had superior hardware.

I used to work in a microelectronics manufacturing facility and I got to learn about the manufacturing side of Microsoft's experienced, and observed, failures that you mentioned when covering the RoHS (lead-free) directive. Here are some notes I can share to explain in a little more detail: - The failures Microsoft experienced could have likely been avoided had they not cut corners and ran through what is called an "underfill" process. What an underfill is, and looks like, is a secondary manufacturing step to the components being placed on and soldered to the board. The primary manufacturing workflow would be loading the palletized unpopulated (circuit)boards (palletized means they're put into a fixture that ferries them through the machines and gives some buffer so the machine can grab the edge without affecting placement locations). The first step is to go through a stencil printer, which looks/functions a lot like a screen printer for t-shirts if you need something to look up. The boards would then go through the pick-and-place (PnP) machines, which place all the electrical components possibly handled by the units, then run through a reflow oven (which runs a temperature profile to ensure a quality solder joint for each component placed). The secondary process that they DID NOT do, underfill, runs the boards through a stage that gently coats them in a film of adhesive, then cures this adhesive. This step would have kept the components from being able to loosen/desolder and cause "generic hardware failures" in the machine. The next process would have been placing any additional components, such as ones that have to be hand soldered due to being through-hole components (like most electrolytic capacitors), or units that would need to have their thermal paste applied (like the heatsinks). These can be handled by modern PnP machines, but those machines remain incredibly expensive and sometimes it is cheaper to just pay someone to do this. - You likely knew this when making the joke, but in the event you didn't, the RoHS solder paste is technically less tasty than the leaded; lead tastes sweet for a metal. Old pewter dish and cookware used to occasionally contribute to the sweet tastes of food before the negative effects of lead were known. - Additional note is that most leaded solder (paste) is a ratio of 63/37 SnPb (Tin Lead) by weight. RoHS is often the SAC305 alloy, though there are many others, which is typically 96.5% tin, 3% silver, and 0.5% copper. Going back to the reflow step I mentioned in my above chunk of text, SAC305 solder paste has to go through a reflow oven at a much hotter temperature with a more aggressive, and difficult to control, ramping function than SnPb solder paste. SnPb solder paste is eutectic at about 183C, SAC305 is at 220C. What eutectic means is that instead of melting from a solid to liquid, the phase change occurs in almost the same instant (again, SnPb does this in a much tighter frame than SAC305). so to ramp from room temperature in a fabrication facility of likely 22C-25C, it really matters especially when you have to ease it in as using a temperature profile that maximizes temperature immediately will ruin your solder joint (either boil it and cause air pockets, burn it, or create a frail/brittle solder joint). What idea reflow profiles typically look like are if you took the typical plot diagram with a steeper falling action than rising action, and had a modulated cutoff so that it was like a slightly flattish during the part where it breaks the eutectic point (look up reflow profiles if you'd like). I spent years developing these profiles for various semi-finished medical products with test profile boards that I developed by hand with probes measuring all across the boards and placeholder heatsinks to make sure someone's cochlear implant, RNS epilepsy implant, incontinence sacral neuromodulator implant (AND MORE!) would not fail/RROD post implant and activation. - All of this is to say those people that were suggesting to wrap the Xbox 360 in a towel or shove it in an oven weren't totally wrong. They were doing at-home reflowing and potentially resoldering their components to the circuit board. Feel free to ask questions if anyone reads this, I have tons of information/stories.

A consoles lifetime sales numbers are always crazy to look at, What's even crazier is that the Xbox 360 (which is the best selling Xbox) still sold less units then the Playstation 1, 2, 3, and 4, It has however outsold the PSP.

Had multiple red rings over the years. I remember our first 360 out the box had sound issues. My brother sat there and played Skyrim with no sound. We were still happy though like “at least we can play” and we knew it had to be sent back. On a separate note, I have had the same ps3 since 07. I’ve even jailbroken it and reversed it and it still works.

I remember having the red ring on the 360 arcade while playing fable the lost chapters. Shut it off immediately, and started playing without any problems again.

Crazy how common the red ring was and basically everyone experienced it and i've had mine since forever and its never once red ringed once xD

My original white 360 is the only console I've ever owned that stopped working on me. It started with the disc drive only popping out about half an inch (so I had to manually open and close the tray) and then it eventually red-ringed after about 4 years. I still have consoles older than it was that are still perfectly functioning, like a fat PS2 and an N64, so for me to be affected by the red ring means the manufacturing faults were dire with the 360. The slim black 360 is the only instance in my life where I had purchased the same console a second time.