Why Are Controller Buttons Like That?

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Tectoy is actually the manufacturer of Sega consoles in Brazil, and are a can of worms on their own. They are still making variants of the Master System to this day.

I like Nintendo’s modernisation of the start/select buttons just being plus and minus symbols. You associate them with pausing, starting, etc. but they’re also interchangeable like the rest of the buttons. The menu buttons on the other controllers feel too specific sometimes.

What's kind of fascinating is that controller design starting off wild and then them all ending up basically the same is something that is well known, documented and named in biology. It is called convergent evolution. The idea is that for a specific task, there really is just one, optimal way to do it that, no matter where you start from, you will always converge towards so long as your goal is to improve

I always assumed that And B were representations of words instead of letters "accept and back" "Action and Block" "Accelerator and Brake"

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@5:55 “Leave Luck to Heaven” is a dubious translation. The name 任天堂 has the characters 任 to take responsibility or to entrust responsibility to someone, the kunyomi of which is “makaseru” which if you’re a sushi connoisseur you’d probably know the term お任せ“omakase” which means you’re leaving the choices of your dinner to the chef’s recommendations. 天 is heaven, but can also be a synonym for genius 天才. 堂 is a hall or chamber of sorts, a big room, usually dedicated to a singular activity for an institution. 天堂 together means the halls of heaven / heaven’s domain or paradise. None of these characters mean luck. The name itself doesn’t exactly have a clear meaning, but it seems to suggest to me that the company is asking you to entrust them with your idea of paradise. Like if you buy their products they promise to sweep you off your feet and take you to heaven.

7:34 - That third button on the Genesis, and no select, is probably due to Sega's more arcade game focused roots. the JAMMA (Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association) standard for arcade cabinet interfaces supports 3 buttons for each player. A lot of what was on the System 16 arcade board made it into the Mega Drive / Genesis.

On the Xbox button colour layout: A is green: accept/go B is red: back/stop They could have chosen the X button to be green which would be on brand but allocated blue to it instead. Also note that the GameCube followed that colour convention as well.

I always had a theory about the PlayStation symbols, that they were maybe based on the amount of lines they took to draw them E.g. Circle = 1 line, Cross = 2 lines, Triangle = 3 lines and Square = 4. Probably not to be honest, but I just enjoy thinking that and you can’t stop me.

True story about the OG Xbox controller, we called the Cadillac in my circle, once after a Halo lan party I dropped a controller under my car and didn’t notice it. I drove over that controller and it still worked fine. Those things were tanks. You could use it like a flail and it would be considered a deadly weapon.

ABXY makes sense for a mathematician or an old school programmer, they're the letters assigned to geometrical variables. AB for the sides of the figure, and XY for the vertices.

26:24 - So, funny story... I kickstarted that coffee table book and have a physical copy in my storage....

There's merit to the theory about Japanese being read right to left, in certain contexts. The "traditional" label might mislead you into thinking it isn't used, but it's still very common to see books and magazines written right to left. It's particularly common with magazines and most manga is written that way, the books are just backwards from our perspective, you read right page first, then the left one. It doesn't matter if you use English alphabet when writing this way, what matters is the order of reading. If an A and B, which aren't part of the same word, appear in this context, you'd read the right one first. It may not be the correct answer but I don't think it should be dismissed, there's a lot more merit to the theory than you'd think.

7:30 Sega was primarily an arcade game developer, the Genesis/Mega Drive controller having 3 buttons was much less a reaction to what Nintendo was doing than it was an attempt to bring the arcade experience home by basing their controller layout off the then widely adopted JAMMA standard being used in arcades for several years up to that point, which specified each player be given 4 directional inputs, 3 action buttons (numbered 1, 2, and 3 from left to right), and a start button.

One neat detail you didn't mention about the PS1 controller: Nintendo actually owns the patent on the cross-shaped d-pad design, which is why it has an X in the middle to make it four separate five-sided buttons. Also, the Dualshock 2 didn't have analog triggers, that was the Dualshock 3. DS 2's L2 and R2 buttons still worked just like L1 and R1.

And like I said a couple months ago, Lex has entered the "you didn't know you needed this" space and is rocking it I'm so glad I found this channel

I personally also think another reason A is right of B in the Nintendo controllers, is that they most likely played with their thumbs resting on the primary button without having to hover over the other button, which for the right hand makes more sense to be further to the right

in the PS2 not only were the face buttons pressure sensitive, but also the dpad and triggers, every button except select, start, analog and the stick clicks are pressure sensitive also a fun fact about the Saturn and Dreamcast, they were the first ever consoles to use hall effect joysticks, yep, hall effect, the feature that is so praised and looked for nowadays already was on those consoles almost 30 years ago, that means those controllers haven't gotten drift and never will

It's difficult to describe how much I love this video essay; it's changed my world view. Because of it I discovered that the N64 is a perfect, incredibly optimum GBA controller: Select -> C-Left (secondary position), Start -> C-Down (primary position). Ergo, the hands can press every single button without ever moving from the home position. From here the goal is to reduce force as much as possible; the wing chun sticky hands. Similar to how a Victorinox makes the hand and the blade's handle become one. Based on your principle of action buttons designated as primary and secondary in relation to comfort, I believe that the Super Nintendo and beyond layout could have been corrected as: Primary Primary Action Button (A) GREEN - Bottom Primary Secondary Action Button (B) RED - Left Secondary Primary Action Button (X) BLUE - Top Secondary Secondary Action Button (Y) YELLOW - Right This layout should be the most efficient and intuitive when at the end of the day.