Xbox Engineer Goes Above And Beyond To Save Player's Old 360 Profile Pic

In wholesome news, an Xbox employee made it their mission to save a gamer's Xbox 360 profile picture following its slow and painful demise. Gabriel Roland took to Twitter to show how the Xbox software was shrinking his avatar every generation and it piqued the interest of Eden Marie, engineering lead at Xbox, who vowed to do what she could to help.

As The Verge notes, in mid-August Gabriel posted on Twitter: "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 f***** if it won't remain the best dollar I've ever spent until the seas boil over." Accompanying the tweet was the image showing how distorted his avatar has become which, admittedly, was pretty funny. But then in comes Marie who takes it upon herself to help.

What comes next is Eden telling us the steps she had to take to find out what was causing the issue and then a subsequent fix for avatars that look like this. She also reveals that it's kind of fine to do this on company time because Microsoft allows her and colleagues to spend a half-day each week working on whatever they want within the system which is pretty cool.

Marie tells us that there are a couple of main issues. One, is that 360 era avatars were stuck at 72 x 72 pixels. Two, that circle avatars are now encouraged rather than square. And three, if 360 avatars would even support transparent images (so the UI background can be seen rather than just an ugly block of pixels).

After some hard work and an excellent thread explaining the process, Marie did it. She fixed the avatar and now the software changes to bring this update to everyone seems to be in its alpha stages. Though it might not be the biggest quality of life update we've ever seen in games, it's certainly pretty wholesome to have someone work this hard to make a proper difference to a select few users' Xbox experience.

You can see the entire thread from Eden Marie talking through the process here.

Topics: Xbox