E3 is all about big announcements, which usually means somebody, somewhere says something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Whether they’re speaking hyperbolically, or they’re flat out lying, sometimes E3 just ends up giving gamers something to laugh at, or feel offended by. This year, at E3 2016, the biggest of these has to go to Microsoft, with their absurd “highest quality pixels” statement during the Xbox One Project Scorpio announcement, which we made a lot of fun of on the AOTF Podcast.
Around 1:31 in the video below you’ll hear what is now the edited version of this statement. Originally the trailer said “these are the highest quality pixels that anybody has seen” after the “uncompressed pixels” comment. If you view any of the full live streams though, you can still find the statement near the end of the conference, such as right here.
The removal of the statement isn’t too shocking, it quickly became the “giant enemy crab” moment of this E3. There have already been videos, Reddit posts, and other memes made about this statement, so Microsoft seems to be trying to distance themselves from it.
The humor comes from the idea of “high quality pixels”. Just in case you aren’t aware, this is a ridiculous thing to say, because a pixel is simply a single point of light (for clarity, pixels are made up of smaller subpixels, so technically three dots of light that form one point for your eye). Sure, a TV or monitor might have higher quality pixels, in that they are physically made to be brighter, or more vibrant, but a game console can’t. It is just sending the image along for the display to render.
This particular section of the trailer is still pretty absurd though, with the “uncompressed pixels” part being left in. Sure, video being compressed lowers quality, but it’s not really the individual pixels that are compressed. The whole thing is just crazy, and should have been removed before it was blasted across the internet to millions of gamers, most of which know that saying you have the “highest quality pixels” is like saying you have “the best polygons” or some other equally useless phrase. And it seems that Microsoft agrees, since they went to the trouble of editing it out of the final upload.
