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One of the most widespread hardware failures to plague consumer electronics was the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death, an unfixable light pattern — unaccompanied by an error code, unlike other Xbox 360 failures — that represented one or more hardware components have broken down in some way. A new report claims that GameStop learned how to fix it back in 2009, and has been reselling the refurbished consoles ever since. The fix, it turns out, could very well have been temporary, which means the much-derided GameStop was selling Xbox 360s marked for death.

Last console generation, the iconic four-quadrant circular light on the Xbox 360’s power button was the cause of much heartbreak. If everything was in working order, the top-left quadrant and inner power symbol would glow green. If something was amiss, quadrants would light up red — all four if there was an AV cable error, or the top and bottom left if the console was overheating, for instance.

Game Informer estimates that 54.2% of Xbox 360 consoles have experienced a Red Ring, meaning more than half of Xbox 360 owners have a hardware failure war story. As part of a Business Week article that detailed how retail chain GameStop has thus far managed to stay afloat in an ever-increasing digital world, the site reports that GameStop was reselling temporarily repaired Red Ringed consoles.

The Red Ring was the result of a faulty connection between chip and motherboard, and — despite a slew of questionable homebrew fixes found throughout message boards — almost always resulted in sending the console back to Microsoft for repair. GameStop’s admittedly ingenious repair team discovered that by heating the top of the console while cooling the bottom, the connection between chip and motherboard could be fixed. The report states that GameStop built its own repair machine, which is operated by a $10-per-hour employee, and resells the refurbished consoles at near-full price. While we all know GameStop is the dictator of trade-ins, it was company policy not to accept Red-Ringed consoles — even though they built a machine to fix and prep those very consoles for resale.



Sadly, the fix is likely temporary. The GameStop heating-and-cooling method sounds similar to the famous towel method that spread across the internet; remove everything (that’s easily removed) but the power supply from the Xbox 360, wrap it entirely in towels, plug the console in and let it run for 20 minutes, turn it off and unplug for 20 minutes, and it should work once again. The towel method often worked because it used the console’s own heat to re-melt solder on the GPU, but generally proved to be a temporary fix because of the inherent flaws in the motherboard that caused the problem in the first place.

So, it’s entirely possible that the inflated number of 54.2% is not the result of Microsoft building so many broken consoles, but because previously broken consoles that would break again were being resold through retail stores. Perhaps that’s good news for Microsoft’s reputation, but certainly not good news for GameStop or the customers that purchased the marked-for-death consoles.

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