If you're a long-time Xbox user, you might have some old-school avatars from the 360 days that don't display properly. Eden Marie, an engineering head at Xbox, has taken it on herself to figure out how to fix this issue.
The story begins with a Twitter post from August 18 by @noukon, joking that "With each passing generation, Xbox tries to shame my Pac-Man ghost avatar by shrinking it ever smaller and smaller." Accompanying the post is a picture depicting a tiny picture of the dark blue Pac-Man ghost inside a large gray circle. Others have replied with their own miniscule avatars, including Duke Nukem or Gomez from Fez. One of the replies to the original post came from Eden Marie, an engineering head at Xbox, who said she was going to make it her personal mission to try and fix this bug.
With each passing generation, Xbox tries to shame my Pac-Man ghost avatar by shrinking it ever smaller and smaller. I will not yield. I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006, and I'll be fucked if it won't remain the best dollar I've ever spent until the seas boil over pic.twitter.com/Ji5ttoUVjh
— Gabriel Roland (@noukon) August 19, 2021
The thread brings up the question of how many ways gamerpics can be displayed on the console. Eden says that "if your answer wasn't something like "all of them," then you're wrong." So far, Eden's journey has shown one major inconsistency with how Xbox 360 avatars are shown. When looking at your own profile, the avatar is surrounded by the large gray circle, but that circle doesn't appear when looking at someone else's profile, which is how it's supposed to look. Eden suggests that "something changed a while ago and some plumbing got broken as a result." The Pac-Man ghost was an easy fix, but Eden reports that tiny Fez was the first casualty of this thread.
You can follow this thread from its beginning here.
