This comic came about as a result of the tons of blogs and websites reporting that some kid sent in his Xbox 360 to be repaired for the now infamous “Red Ring of Death” (a hardware fault specific to the Xbox 360 which renders it unusable) and all of his art and autographs from prominent members of the gaming community was scrubbed off of the outside of his case. The articles and blog posts are floating around with the title “Another Gamer Screwed by Microsoft” so you can Google that and find a ton of different resources, but there is a blog post at HawtyMcBloggy which has photos to go along with it. Apparently, he wrote a letter to go along with his Xbox and he even called ahead of time to make sure that the art wouldn’t be erased. It was done in permanent black marker so it isn’t some small thing to take it all off. The case he received back was plain white but with a few smudges here and there which I suppose suggests that someone didn’t just run off with it for monetary gain. Anyway, I hope Microsoft sees the massive response to the story and decides to compensate this guy in some way. I must say, though - I don’t think a trip to the Redmond campus or a free year of Live is going to hack it on this one.

~Mike

UPDATE:

I apologize for some format problems we had in the link to HawtyMcBloggy. We’ve fixed it. For some reason there was some sort of messed up thing with our quotation marks in our code. I think it happened in the transition from the program with which I write the scripts to Wordpress, which is the software which runs the site. Anyway, it should work now, so click away.

Also, it looks like Hawty has some additional info and although the opinion war wages on about the issue, I continue to support the idea that Microsoft hold some responsibility for the promises made to this guy over the phone. At the very least, they need to resolve that issue and attempt to make things right - if only for their own selfish PR reasons.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Comic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.