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by _frog 4327 days ago
It seems like Sony, being a Japanese company, originally intended for O to represent yes, and X to represent no. If you look at a lot of early PlayStation games, or most modern games released in Japan, that convention is apparent. The O and X buttons on the PlayStation controller even match the placement of A and B buttons on Nintendo's controllers, providing a clear analogue between the two.

I'd be curious to know what caused that convention to change in the west.
2 comments
Guvante 4327 days ago
> I'd be curious to know what caused that convention to change in the west.

The XBox controller has a swapped A/B pair and uses A confirm B cancel.

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anon4 4327 days ago
The XBox controller is a clone of the Dreamcast controller. If you go back even further to the Megadrive, it had 6 buttons (on advanced controllers) with two rows of buttons - xyz and ABC arrayed from left to right.

When the Playstation 1 was released, the two consoles consumers could have been familiar with in the west were Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive. SNES had the familiar ABXY, but mirrored with AX on the right. It used A for yes and B for no. The Megadrive had the aforementioned ABCxyz and also used A for yes and B for no. Meaning, one console used the bottom button for yes and the one on its right for no (Megadrive), while the other had the bottom button for no and the one on the right for yes (SNES).

So I doubt SONY copied the competition for their decision to swap the yes/no buttons.

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ANTSANTS 4327 days ago
>SNES had the familiar ABXY, but mirrored with AX on the right.

Those of us that grew up with Nintendo consoles would say that B on the left of A is the natural order of things ;)

>Meaning, one console used the bottom button for yes and the one on its right for no (Megadrive)

Actually, almost every Megadrive game I've played lets you use both A and C for accept in menus, so you could use whichever orientation you were more comfortable with.

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Guvante 4326 days ago
I am just quoting another instance from around that time, besides this is all kind of moot since:

> I doubt SONY copied the competition

IIRC this wasn't decided by SONY, each game used its own variation until a standard was created organically.

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lnanek2 4327 days ago
Makes sense to me. We have scan sheets and forms with empty bubbles and boxes meaning, "not this one," and we put a check mark, X, or other mark in them to indicate our selection.
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