Developer's Journal: It can happen to you

I am generally one of those people that hear people complain about a bad experience with a product and disregard it as one person's bad luck. When people lecture "it could happen to you", I think "Yeah right. I guess it could happen to me. But it never will." You can call me an optimistic skeptic. And for most of my life (thankfully) my skepticism has won out. My iPhone activated fine, my computers never get viruses, and I've never even seen a tornado in Texas. All that started to change this weekend, though, when I met face-to-face one problem I thought would never happen to me: the RRoD.

RRoD, or Red Ring of Death for uninitiated, is the Xbox 360's terminal message. When your Xbox presents you with these three red lights, your console's game playing days are done. Now I've seen all of the reports across the Internet about Xbox owners getting this error and even started to believe the reports that this may be a big problem for the 360. I even remember remarking to myself after a recent episode of the "Windows Weekly" podcast with Paul Thurrott- in which Paul says 7 of his 10 gaming buddies have had the RRoD- that getting the RRoD seems more like when not if it's going to happen. Even my own brother- who will be joining Microsoft in Redmond soon- had to deal with the RRoD this summer. The evidence of this being a major problem was staring me right in the face and I still figured it wouldn't happen to me.

I was wrong. After a long day of working around the house on Saturday, I retreated to my game room and fired up my 360 for a little Call of Duty 4 Beta before dinner. When the normal 360 loading screen didn't show up on my TV, I looked at my Xbox to make sure I turned it on. Much to my shock and dismay, staring back at me was the infamous RRoD I'd read about. It had finally happened to me.

Now, of course, Microsoft has extended the warranty and my Xbox is covered. Soon after the RRoD I ordered the repair service online so that I can ship my Xbox off this week for repairs and hopefully get it back in a few weeks. BUT, this is the biggest week in Xbox gaming of the year! Halo 3 is unleashed on the world Monday night and I was looking forward to "finishing the fight" with my brother and some friends online. What am I to do? Miss the fun and excitement of the Halo 3 launch courtesy of the most untimely RRoD?

No! A quick trip to Best Buy and $350 later I was back in business with an HDMI enabled Xbox. Of course, that action required a fair amount of begging to the wife and a solemn promise that I'd sell my original Xbox when it returned from its Microsoft surgery. So if anybody is looking for a freshly repaired Xbox, look me up in a few weeks.

What's the moral of this tragic story? If we look past the pitifully insignificant nature of the problem, I think we can extract two good lessons from this adventure:

1. If you don't think it can happen to you, it can. Coming directly from someone who didn't think "it" (it could be anything) could happen to them until it did, I know this will do nothing to change those of you reading this that believe it can't happen to you. But when it does, write your own blog post and make sure you say I told you so.
2. If you're planning on playing Halo 3 this Tuesday, make sure you've already made your deals to secure a backup 360. Unless you've already been through the RRoD, there's a good chance you'll need the backup.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make sure I know where to hide if a tornado comes my way this week.