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No-one I've spoken to seems to know this. I've seen the theory that it is because in Japan, a circle has the same sort of positive/accept connotations as a tick does in the West, and the lack of that connotation here is why they were swapped, but I don't buy this: we still have the same negative/cancel association for a cross as the Japanese do, and we don't have any contradictory associations with a circle that would make it particularly unintuitive as a 'confirm' button. Does anyone have any source on why this decision was made? Failing that, does anyone have any idea who at Sony would likely have been responsible for the decision? A programmer on the OS? A marketing guy? 
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Nov 7, 2016 22:05
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K8.0 posted:On the SNES, A was confirm and B was cancel. Go play a SNES RPG, almost all of them use the rightmost button to confirm and the bottom button to cancel. Sony copied the SNES's button layout, but came up with their own symbols and colors since they couldn't get away with just copying the SNES ones. This carried over into the design of most playstation games. The XBox controller was also designed around the SNES controller, but had the button names and colors remapped to make more sense in the context of where your thumb naturally sits. This doesn't explain the change Sony made for the West though. The SNES controller, both in Japan and in the West has the right button (A) for confirm and the bottom button (B) for cancel. The PS controller in Japan has the right button (O) for confirm and the bottom button (X) for cancel. Then in the West, it has the right button (O) for cancel and the bottom button (X) for confirm. Why switch them? It's not like Nintendo swapped the A and B buttons around when the Super Famicom became the SNES and Sony were matching that.
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Nov 8, 2016 00:50
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Charles Get-Out posted:... Localization teams and SCEA chose X as confirm ... Actually, that's an interesting point. I know that on the PS3 and PS4 at least, the role of the Circle/Cross buttons is defined at the firmware level, because on a test/dev kit there's actually a debug option to swap them. But was this true in the PS1 era, or were they actually set on a per-game basis? I never had a PS1; I assume they had a system software menu for poo poo like managing memory card data - how were the Cross/Circle buttons used on that, and did that differ between Japan and the West?
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Nov 8, 2016 08:36
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Charles Get-Out posted:I thought about mentioning that, but you might find it interesting that very very few games hook into the firmware confirm choice on PS3/PS4. It's really annoying because on PSP/PS3/PSVITA/PS4 devs can use the built-in save system that runs off the firmware button choice so if you play a Japanese import game on a US console, the game itself will Circle confirm and X cancel, but the Playstation save/load screen will X confirm and Circle cancel. I didn't know that, actually, though I guess I should have; I know I've worked on games where using that option lead to inconsistencies with the behaviour of the game menus versus the system menus, so the logic is obvious when I stop and think about it. Charles Get-Out posted:The PS1/PS2 didn't have an in-built save system and so games would use whatever button they were programmed for. I've never owned a Japanese PS1, but the PS2 start-up and memory management did use Circle confirm, I spoke to a colleague today; Japanese PS1s did apparently use the Circle:Confirm/Cross:Cancel system for memcard management. Wikipedia of all places, had some ostensible info on the subject: it says: quote:The OK and Cancel buttons on most of the Japanese PlayStation games are reversed in their North American and European releases. In Japan, the Circle button (maru, right) is used as the OK button, while the X button (batsu, wrong) is used as Cancel. North American and European releases have the X button or the Circle buttons as the OK button, while either the Square or the Triangle button is used as Cancel (some titles like Xenogears used the Circle button for cancelling actions and selections, along with the PlayStation 2 system browser and the XrossMedia Bar on the PlayStation 3 and the PSP).[21] However, a few games, such as Square's Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy VII (which used the X button as cancel) and Final Fantasy Tactics, Namco's Ridge Racer Type 4, and Konami's Metal Gear Solid, use the Japanese button layout worldwide. Some other games, like the Japanese version of Gran Turismo, had used different controls that are similar to North American games. These Japanese button layouts still apply to other PlayStation consoles. This is because in the early years Sony America (SCEA),[44] Sony Europe (SCEE), and Sony Japan (SCEJ) had different development and testing documents (TRCs) for their respective territories.[45] But I don't buy that. The system software for the West, which used Circle:Confirm/Cross:Cancel would have been programmed before TRCs were being given out to potential publishers, and even if it hadn't been, it would still be a conscious decision on Sony's part to make the button conventions different in the West; the TRCs are simply how they would have enforced that decision. They don't explain the motivation behind it. And also, I'm skeptical even in that regard, since there were plenty of Japanese games like the FF series which were released in the West with the Japanese button conventions. It's true Sony play fast and loose with subchecks for major titles (Destiny got away with a shitload of stuff that a less big-ticket game would have failed on) but it still seems unlikely they'd go to all the trouble of coding different system software and mandating different button functions via TRCs, then just let it slide on so many games, along with poo poo like using "Triangle" as cancel. The sources quoted in the Wikipedia article, by the way, are a Japanese shareholder press release which appears to no longer exist (the other three releases from that month do not mention anything which could support the assertion in the article) and an issue of "Hollywood Reporter" from 1994 which I can't find any scans of online, but which doesn't seem like the sort of place where you'd expect to find mention of the minutiae of controller design.
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Nov 8, 2016 22:19
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Charles Get-Out posted:That's weird and I can't think of games that use Triangle or Square to cancel off the top of my head. Maybe it's a symptom of what I played the most, but FF8 and a lot of other JRPGs were X confirm/Circle cancel. See, again, this definitely indicates a particular motive on Sony's part. I just wish I knew what. Gonna have to see if we have any archived TRC docs at work. Doubt we'll have any from that far back, though.
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Nov 9, 2016 08:33
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