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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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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.