PlayStation 3

Sony designer Teiyu Goto spills the beans as to what he had in mind with each button:

"Other game companies at the time assigned alphabet letters or colors to the buttons. We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols, and I came up with the triangle-circle-X-square combination immediately afterward. I gave each symbol a meaning and a color. The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink. The circle and X represent ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision-making and I made them red and blue respectively. People thought those colors were mixed up, and I had to reinforce to management that that’s what I wanted."

Circle’s representation of “yes” is prevalent in Japanese culture, but not in America. Stateside, X is the common decision-making button, because we tend to think of a controller’s bottom button as the main one.

PlayStation’s placement of a triangle button on top is rather intuitive, because it looks like an up arrow. It represents a user’s viewpoint or perspective, making it a great button to launch maps or change the game perspective. The square represented a piece of paper, making it ideal for showing navigation lists and menus. The circle and the X mean yes and no, and they’re meant for navigating yes and no operations.Maybe the best button names resemble their orientation.

Function aside, PlayStation’s buttons have arguably been most useful as marketing. The four symbols, when used together, are instantly associated with the PlayStation brand. You can’t say that about A, B and C.
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"Dear diary: Today I was pompous and my sister was crazy. Today we were kidnapped by hill folk, never to be seen again. It was the best day ever."

Yeah I agree. As I child I committed the SNES layout to memory so holding/manipulating the Xbox controllers is especially disorienting.
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"Dear diary: Today I was pompous and my sister was crazy. Today we were kidnapped by hill folk, never to be seen again. It was the best day ever."

steker16 posted...

From: 656stooge | #002

A,B,X and Y suck because both Ninty and MS use them but each company has the buttons in different positions..

cool logic,bro

This



Also i prefer A,B,X,Y over X,O,[],^
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PSN:PHEEliNUX
"Lesser Demon is less than a Demon, But more than an Imp"

Thy are iconic and that's why they're tattooed on me.
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l'm Rip, l love gaming. Been gaming since SNES and this is my channel~
http://www.youtube.com/user/ZeitgeistGamer?feature=mhee

.... I miss the SNES controller o_o
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"All things are about Jesus Homer .......... Except this."