After navigating the PlayStation support line's various menus and advertisements, I got on the line with a support specialist I will call Denise, mainly because I completely forgot to write down her real name. Denise had never encountered this particular issue before, so she put me on hold to research a bit in between restoring the system's default setting and performing a hard reset. The verdict? My poor little PS3 is dead.

Not all the way dead, mind you. I can still play PlayStation 2 games and access the PSN. It seems as if the Blu-ray portion of the drive just gave up the ghost, turning the system into something of a PlayStation 2.5. It could be as simple as dust on the lens, but the PS3's Blu-ray workings are situated in a place where compressed air fears to tread. I could open the system and futz around inside, but...no. Electronics have been known to spontaneously catch on fire when I even consider touching them, just to save themselves from the horror my giant snausage fingers would inflict upon them.

So it's back to repair for my shiny black system, eventually. I am currently playing through Mana Khemia for the PS2 on it, and while I have a fully functioning memory card adapter there is no way I can go back to playing this on my composite-connected PS2 after starting it on my HDMI PS3. The whole thing will run me $149, but it sure beats just buying a new one.

The ultimate irony here is that right next to my PlayStation 3 sits my launch Xbox 360, it's glowing green light mocking my plight. Truly I must live in some sort of bizarro world when the world's most unreliable video game console lasts longer than what I often considered the most solid piece of video game hardware to come out in years. If I had to guess, I'd say the PS3 committed suicide after too many viewings of A Knight's Tale on Blu-ray. I shall be more careful of my viewing habits in the future.

The manufacturing test equipment had major gaps in test coverage and wasn't reliable or repeatable. Manufacturing processes at all levels of suppliers were immature and not in control. Initial end to end yields were in the mid 30%. Low yields always indicate serious design and manufacturing defects. Management chose to continue to ship anyways, and keep the lines running while trying to solve problems and bring the yields up. Whenever something failed and there was a question about whether the test result was false, they would remove that test, retest and ship, or see if the unit would boot a game and run briefly and then ship. 360 is too complex of a machine to get away with that.

Reasons for the failures vary, but the anonymous interviewee narrows it down to one main source - the GPU.

The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life.

Inside Source Reveal the Truth About Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" Failures [8Bit Joystick]