A brief history of A & B buttons on game controllers

Matthew Gallant over at The Quixotic Engineer has posted an interesting look at the evolution of the A & B buttons on game controllers. Me, I’ve got a Dreamcast so my world is backwards whenever I play on someone’s Nintendo system–it takes a second to get up to speed. Sony abandoned the whole letter thing and went with a circle, cross, triangle, and square, which one of the commenters pointed out:

# Jonathan Says:
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:06 am

Regarding the PlayStation controller, I read the following today :

circle = one stroke
cross = two strokes
triangle = three strokes
square = four strokes

Which then seems to align it with Nintendo’s layout.

Neat.