Red Ring of Death Replaced by Red Dot of Death

By Ryan Fleming June 21, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Let’s be clear, we truly hope that this will never ever become an issue. In a perfect world, it would only be the academics and the product testers that ever have a first-hand experience with this, but if experience has taught us anything, it is to be prepared for the worst. To break the negative connotations that the sight of a red ring on Xbox 360’s bring to mind, Microsoft has removed that particular feature from its newly slimmed down and redesigned Xbox 360s. Instead, users might face the dreaded red dot of death.

If you own an Xbox 360, there is an alarmingly high probability that you have had first-hand experience with the red ring of death. When something went wrong with the hardware, four lights would turn red, and each of the red lights signified a different problem. If the first light was not flashing while the other three blinked, it likely meant a cable was disconnected and you could breathe a sigh of relief. If the third light was steady while the others flashed, then you were in trouble and likely needed to repair, or replace your 360.

Recommended Videos

The new Xbox 360 will no longer feature the red ring, instead, if there is a significant hardware problem, the green power light will turn red. It is much more soothing to see, at least until you realize what it means. Again, we hope that this is never, ever an issue, but if you see your new Xbox 360 turn red in the center, be afraid. Be very afraid.

The issues with the older Xbox 360s stemmed from a combination of a bad chipset and overheating. It reached such epic proportions, that as many as 42 percent of Xbox 360s were suggested to be affected. The chipset was eventually replaced, which drastically improved the reliability, but heat did still cause a few red ring issues. The new redesign should fundamentally help with the problems that caused the red ring in the first place.

Heat is the nemesis of many a good piece of electronics, and the Xbox 360 seemed especially susceptible to it. The new design features a smaller chip that combines the CPU and GPU, which should significantly reduce the heat output. The dual fan of the original units has been replaced by a single, quieter fan, but the lowered heat of the chip should be easily handled by the single fan.

The red ring of death may soon be gone, but it will not be forgotten.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Ryan Fleming is the Gaming and Cinema Editor for Digital Trends. He joined the DT staff in 2009 after spending time covering…

Gaming

Elden Ring: How to find and use Rune Arcs

An Elden Ring player sits on their horse and looks out at a castle ahead.

Like everything else developed by FromSoftware, Elden Ring is painfully difficult. It'll take you hundreds of hours to discover everything it has to offer, and unless you're a grizzled veteran, you'll likely hit the "Game Over" screen thousands of times before your journey in the Lands Between comes to an end.

One way to help even the odds is by using Rune Arcs — a consumable item that lets you access Great Runes. You'll first need to unlock Great Runes to start properly using Rune Arcs, but once that's taken care of, you'll notice a big boost in your abilities.

Gaming

Rebuild your own nostalgia with this detailed Xbox 360 toy set

xbox 360 mega building set replica

Although Microsoft is shutting down the Xbox 360 Store next year and definitely wants you to pick up its newest console for Starfield, it has still found a new way to appeal to the nostalgia of Xbox 360 players. It's doing so through the new Mega Showcase Microsoft Xbox 360 Collector Building Set, which will be available this October.

This set will be available starting on October 8 and will cost you $150 dollars; that said, you'll only be able to pick one up at Target. Mega makes Lego-like replica models of things for people to build, and this one is intricately designed to look like the launch version of Xbox 360. It's at 3:4 scale and made up of 1342 pieces. With it, players can build a version of the Xbox 360, a controller, and a case and disc for Halo 3. Even the packaging it comes in looks like the boxes Xbox 360 consoles came in at release.
Once built, this model will actually have working lights and a disc drive, as well as a hard drive and side shell panels that are removable. It obviously won't be able to play actual Xbox 360 games, but it still looks like a faithful recreation of Microsoft's classic game console. This is far from the first time we've seen video games and their consoles branch over into the work of buildable toys, as Nintendo patterned with Lego to create various Mario sets as well as a replica NES.
The Mega Showcase Microsoft Xbox 360 Collector Building Set releases exclusively at Target on October 8.

Gaming

The impending Xbox 360 Store closure makes me wary of Game Pass’ future

I'm an avid Xbox Game Pass user, often trying almost every game that comes to the service and closely following the games coming to and leaving the service each month. Following some recent announcements by Microsoft, though, I've been thinking a lot more about something else about Xbox Game Pass and Microsoft's current digital-focused Xbox storefronts and ecosystem: what happens when it all goes away?
Microsoft announced last week that it will shut down the Xbox 360 Store in July 2024. After that day, it will be impossible to buy games, movies, or TV shows digitally on the Xbox 360 store; it's just like what happened with the 3DS and Wii U eShops earlier this year. That announcement also came not long after Microsoft revealed it would replace Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Game Pass Core in September. With these changes, Microsoft is stamping out any support or focus its giving to the Xbox 360's era as a platform. As someone who grew up mostly playing Xbox 360, seeing these things I grew up with go away is saddening. It's also making me think about the day this will eventually happen to Xbox Game Pass or the store on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Frankly, I'm not as concerned that Microsoft is going to do it anytime soon. Microsoft has given no indication that it plans on abandoning Xbox Game Pass. It's a really successful subscription service heavily integrated into all of its current platforms, there are titles confirmed to launch day one on it into 2024 and beyond, and Xbox initiatives like Play Anywhere and Smart Delivery ensure that at least some version of most Xbox games are available on other platforms. While I expect it to be the primary part of Microsoft's gaming strategy over the next decade, as someone who mainly played Xbox 360 growing up and is now seeing its storefront and subscription service go away, I'm now thinking about what the end of the Game Pass era will look like.
These recent actions have indicated that Microsoft will eventually be willing to do the same to the storefronts and subscription service we're currently using. Even after the backlash PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all faced from these announcements, Sony is the only one that has backtracked its plans to close down older digital storefronts, at least temporarily. Xbox Game Pass is the current hotness for Microsoft, but what happens come the day it isn't? A lot more games are digital-only or tied to a subscription this generation, and those are the games most at risk of being lost if a digital storefront shuts down.
What happens to the Xbox console versions of games like Pentiment or Immortality on Xbox once Xbox Game Pass and the current iteration of the Xbox Store are shuttered? Yes, they can be played on PC, but the Xbox console version will be lost forever. And right now, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has any publicly shared plans to permanently preserve those experiences, nor has it done so for all of the Xbox 360 digital games going away. Game preservation is a significant problem facing the game industry, and Microsoft has just made a move showing that it's on the wrong side of that effort.