Ex-Microsoft gaming VP and Xbox 360 lead creator calls the infamous Red Ring of Death a "Tylenol moment" — what does that mean? Here's what he said

You may have never experienced it if you're a new or young Xbox gamer, but longtime fans of Microsoft's 25-year-old gaming brand will undoubtedly remember the infamous "Red Ring of Death" from the Xbox 360 era in the mid-2000s.

This notorious hardware issue began cropping up everywhere soon after the console's 2005 launch, and is thought to have been caused by overheating that warped the soldering connecting the system's motherboard to its GPU, resulting in failure. When this happened, the Xbox 360's green lighting would glare an ominous red, and it would no longer be usable.

In a new interview, former Xbox vice president Peter Moore (make sure you check out more of what he said) reflected on the Red Ring of Death, suggesting Microsoft may not have caught wind of the console's design flaw due to its rush to release it ahead of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3. He also noted how the discovered workaround of wrapping a Red Ring of Death-afflicted Xbox in a towel — believed to cause enough overheating to melt warped soldering again, and reform a connection between the components — helped Microsoft identify the problem.

"I don't think corners were cut, I don't think QA [quality assurance] was negligent in any way, but we're about six months in, and we start to get a lot of calls from retailers that were getting a lot of returns. ... All of the sudden those red rings would connect, and that would indicate you've got a bricked console," Moore said.

"One of the interesting workarounds was wrapping a towel around it. And so that would give some indication that somehow by creating internal heat — which feels like the opposite of what you should be doing — we thought that maybe whatever was going on ... that it was resoldering, and we [thought] a lot of it was down to the EU's mandate of lead-free soldering on some of the motherboards," he continued. "I'm still not sure to this day what it was all about, but we had to figure out what I called at that time, a 'Tylenol moment.'"

Peter Moore’s video game stories: “Maybe the console wars were my fault” - YouTube

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If you're like me, you're probably wondering what Moore could possibly mean by calling the sudden appearance of Red Ring of Death issues a "Tylenol moment." Thankfully, he was quick to explain the exact meaning of that phrase, and how Microsoft committed to doing right by every gamer affected by the design defect.

"From the perspective of what was going on then, if you remember...tragic night in Chicago when some unbelievable human being put cyanide in Tylenol on a drug store shelf, and the people who took Tylenol that night died," Moore said. "The reason I call it a Tylenol moment is Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, went out of business within two hours and said, 'take every piece of our product off the shelf and destroy it, and we're gonna figure out what's going on here.'"

"I always looked at that as a marketer as this emphatic, 'we're not gonna make excuses, we're not gonna dilly-dally, we're gonna actually make good for the consumer immediately.' And so I called Red Rings of Death a Tylenol moment," he continued. "What we needed to do is for every impacted gamer, we would overnight a box with a return label, a custom-made box that you'd put your Xbox 360 in ... and we would then fix it or send you a new one via FedEx again."

This is indeed what Microsoft did as it worked to fix the issue with the Xbox 360's design that caused the Red Ring of Death in the first place. The entire process cost the firm a whopping $1.15 billion, but Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO at the time, approved the initiative without a second thought to keep the Xbox brand in the good graces of consumers.

"Yeah, when we rounded all that up, it was $1.15 billion, and I had to go and see [Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO] and say, 'Look, this brand will die if we don't do this, and I think we have a huge opportunity to make this one of the great entertainment brands, and Microsoft badly needs this.' And he said, 'What's it gonna cost?' ... I said it's gonna be $1.15 billion. He said, 'Do it.'"

It should go without saying that Microsoft made the right move; the Xbox 360 ended up being a massive success for the company and its gaming brand, but the business would have likely nosedived into the ground if Microsoft didn't own up and make things right.

🗨️ Did you ever get the Red Ring of Death?

The Red Ring of Death became an infamous part of Xbox history, so much so that Microsoft even sold a poster referencing it a few years ago. If you own or owned an Xbox 360, I'm curious to know: were you ever affected by the Red Ring of Death yourself? If so, did Microsoft repair it for you without issue? Let me know in the comments, and vote in the below poll.

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