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A viral Twitter thread of someone’s old Gamertag profile photo on Xbox 360 that was weirdly cropped with every new Xbox console prompted an Xbox engineer to go ahead and… fix the issue.
As reported by The Verge, Twitter user Noukon bought the ghostly avatar of Pac-Man years ago and has kept it as a profile picture ever since. According to Nocon, they bought Gamerpic for 80 points on Xbox in 2006, and it would be “a problem if it weren’t for the best dollar you’ve ever spent until the seas poured out.”
With each passing generation, Xbox tries to shame my Pac-Man avatar by making it smaller and smaller. I will not give up. I bought this gamerpic for 80 xbox points in 2006 and I would fail if it weren’t for a better dollar I spent until the sea was overflowing pic.twitter.com/Ji5ttoUVjh
Gabriel Rowland (@noukon) August 19, 2021
Unfortunately, developments in the Xbox user interface mean that the 2006 profile picture now looks like a small square surrounded by an empty gray circle. Luckily, Xbox Engineer Aiden Marie saw Nokoun’s tweet and decided to move forward with fixing the issue, calling it his “personal mission to fix this issue.”
Marie posted a full thread on Twitter about her process, starting with purchasing the same set of profile photos as Noukon ($ 2.38 bonus), before starting to diagnose and possibly fix the issue.
Listen, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll make it my personal mission to fix this https://t.co/o1zYjBBHSd
– Eden Marie (@neonepiphany) 25 August 2021
According to Marie, “A long time ago, someone decided that no matter what size a Gamerpic we wanted to display, a Gamerpic 360 would only be 72 x 72 pixels. “The rest of the background is filled with a small, magnified version of herself,” says Marie.
The solution, in the end, was the ability of the Xbox Dashboard to recognize transparent PNG files. This allowed Mari to take a small, 360-era Gamerpic square and place it in a transparent circle and adjust the dimensions, resulting in a static and completely natural Pac-Man avatar for Noukon.
Marie was able to fix the problem during what’s known as exploration time, where experienced team members can spend half a day each week tackling random elements of the product. “This week I definitely chose to use it to save ghosts,” Marie wrote on Twitter.
It’s so much fun, and sometimes you learn something new, like … Apparently 360 gamerpics supported transparency from the start?
Surprise
Anyway, what do you think, Integrated Tweet? Do you feel better with that dollar? pic.twitter.com/zxQx7SmHJw
– Eden Marie (@neonepiphany) August 27, 2021
Who knows, maybe the next time you run into a weird problem on Xbox Live, an Xbox engineer with some spare time can fix your problem for you?
Matt TM Kim is the editor-in-chief of IGN. You can reach it Integrated Tweet.
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