Xbox is celebrating its 25-year anniversary today, November 15, 2026. Below, we take a look back at Microsoft’s great, and infamously buggy, second console.
In the mid to late aughts, the Xbox 360 reigned supreme. It felt like the center of the gaming universe, as the best place to play multiplatform hits like Modern Warfare and Grand Theft Auto, and the only way to play exclusive blockbusters like Halo 3. All of my high school friends were on Xbox Live every night, and online gaming became a ritual to me. My clearest, purest memories of gaming come from this era, and the Xbox 360 remains one of my favorite consoles of all time. It’s too bad that I burned through so many of them.
The Xbox 360 was as infamous for hardware failures as it was famous for its amazing software library. It’s nearly impossible to look back at the 360 without also recalling the Red Ring of Death, the ominous three red lights surrounding the power button that indicates a general hardware error. This red ring was a plague on the initial Xbox 360 model, and the shipping and repairs for affected consoles cost Microsoft a little over a billion dollars. The Xbox 360 platform as a whole had an amazing lifespan–the first Xbox 360 consoles themselves, though, did not.
Somehow, I had completely avoided the dreaded red ring with my original 360 model, but it wasn’t spared of all technical issues. One night, I plopped my Halo 3 disc in the tray, only to be met with a suspicious clicking-like noise. Instead of the Halo 3 icon appearing on my dashboard, a generic “Open Tray” message appeared in its place. Troubleshooting was a maddening process–all of my discs were returning the same message, and Google searches were largely unhelpful. Despite the functioning software, my 360 refused to read any of my physical games. It quickly became clear that my 360 was a lemon.
