The Xbox brand is known for its iconic shade of dark green. The color dominates the console’s logos, backgrounds, gift cards, game boxes, and the original Xbox’s startup screen and dashboard. At this point, the Xbox brand is so associated with green that it is hard to imagine any other color filling that role.
One Reddit user was thus surprised to discover the box for an Xbox Series X decked out in a peculiar shade of light blue. And while this sort of anomaly is more common than some might think, it’s still interesting to see a piece of Xbox branding without the iconic hue.
Reddit user Confluxster stumbled across the blue Xbox Series X box as part of a display in a local GameStop. They snapped a picture and posted it to the Xbox subreddit, wondering if it was some kind of special edition. While that’s probably not the case, a few people on the subreddit found the apparent defect amusing. One commenter, noticing how the shade of blue resembles the one featured on a lot of PlayStation branding, dubbed it the “The Sony Playbox Series 5,” evoking some bizarre alternate reality product crossover.
The actual answer is much less dramatic, being neither a limited-edition Xbox Series X console nor a delivery from another universe. While some in the comments suggested it could be a printing error, it’s more likely that the green ink simply faded after being exposed to direct sunlight for too long. That particular box may have sat propped up against a store window to entice customers, soaking up enough rays to turn from green to blue before employees moved it to the current display.
That explanation might seem flawed at first. After all, the rest of the box does not show any significant signs of fading, and definitely nothing as radical as a complete color change. However, this can be explained by the ways UV light interacts with different color pigments. Green pigments, like those on the Xbox Series X box, are a mix of blue and yellow. Yellow pigments absorb UV light more quickly than blue, causing them to fade faster when exposed to sunlight. Eventually, the yellow fades away completely, leaving only the blue pigment.
This explains why the green faded so quickly despite the minimal discoloration over the rest of the box. It’s also not an uncommon occurrence. One commenter even linked to a photograph of a discolored Grand Theft Auto 4 Collector’s Edition box where the green Xbox 360 branding faded to the same shade of blue. Still, while the explanation might not be all that exciting, it’s interesting to see some Xbox packaging with a decidedly PlayStation color scheme.
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