1645
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
1645 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
59648 readers
1479 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
To be fair, I have seen the XBox theory floated repeatedly on the internet, never with any acknowledgement that the timeline doesn't make sense...
Insofar as I can determine from my standpoint of being a video game collector who has no inside knowledge but was at least there at the time, Sony copied the SNES pad when they split from Nintendo after the original Play Station add-on debacle. As a matter of fact, the original original plan was to just use the SNES controller itself to begin with. The button conventions for the subsequent Playstation pad were obviously meant to be a direct copy-paste of the above and intended to be used in the same way as was currently the norm for Japanese console RPG's on Nintendo's machine: A was for OK and B was for cancel/back. The Playstation O button is where the SNES A button is, and the Playstation X button is where the SNES B button is. It all makes sense.
...Until it got switched. Only outside of Japan. For reasons that no one responsible has ever seen fit to document, at least publicly.
The theory I've seen accepted here is that A was closer to the thumb: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/34650/what-reason-could-nintendo-have-had-for-putting-the-a-and-b-buttons-in-a-non-alp#34652
And perhaps on the XBox/PS controllers with 4 buttons, the bottom button is the natural rest position.
I would love to see someone do a study on if there's an intuitive layout or if it's all just learned.