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The story
Some Super Famicom-era games actually assigned the confirm button to B instead of A. Super Mario Kart and Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2) are prime examples — their manuals explicitly state “B button to confirm, X button to cancel.” Back then there was no standardized rule for which button confirmed, and it’s said that A gradually became the standard “confirm” button starting around Dragon Quest V. A thread on 5ch’s “Hardware/Industry (Geha)” board took this fact as a jumping-off point and spun into discussion of the PlayStation’s ○/× confirm controversy and how Nintendo settled on the A/B layout to stay consistent with the Game Boy — sparking a lively debate about the history of button layouts.
What people said
Manual: "B button confirms, X button cancels"
Secret of Mana
They made the button down at the "foot" position (where the accelerator sits) double as confirm & accelerate.
Just thought of that one now, though
A is confirm.
The SFC prototype had the easy-to-press Y/B position as B/A.
But the Game Boy's B/A layout was designed at a slight upward-right angle.
They decided to match that Game Boy upward-right layout,
and that's what turned into the Y/B, B/A mess that's dogged Nintendo hardware for decades.
Exactly this.
I'd love to see the parallel universe where they just shipped it with the prototype layout.
Exactly.
I once saw a Namco game where both A and B worked for actions, and I was floored by how smart that was.
○ = yes, × = no.
Each symbol carries its own meaning, and they got flipped.
Westerners just don't associate circle and X with "yes" and "no" the way Japanese people do.
But then DQ6 put the "handy button" on Y — explain that one.
That "diarrhea sound" FM synth, briri-briri~ ♪ (a derisive nickname for the Genesis's distinctive FM sound chip)
What was even the deal with the Wii U GamePad putting both sticks up top?
It's unfair to blame the developers.
They designed it with ○ = confirm, × = cancel — blame whoever handled the overseas negotiations.
Microsoft just acted like Sega's successor and copied that.
There's always someone out there who believes this myth.
One look at the original Xbox controller shows it's false, but a lot of people apparently have never actually seen one.
A symbol with no fixed meaning is also safe.
But you, ○ and ×, you don't get to change both your position and your meaning.
Every system with A and B buttons eventually converged on A = confirm, B = cancel.
So the symbols A and B do carry meaning.
If something like the PC Engine's Button 1/Button 2 had become the standard instead, 1 would've settled in as confirm and 2 as cancel.
I see — so if there are people who value the meaning that got established by game consoles, then swapping ○ and × would be even harder to accept.
Neither A/B nor ○/× are symbols that game consoles invented in the first place, though.
It's literally just the Sega Saturn pad with the right-side C and Z buttons removed — same as the Dreamcast pad.
Go search "Duke controller."
It's a completely different button layout from the Dreamcast's.
If you're gonna say that, then show me a Genesis game that used B to confirm.
The position of the Genesis's A button lines up with B on the SFC and × on the PS1, so that's why B and × ended up as confirm.
There's no such thing as the "same position" between the 3-button/6-button Genesis pad and the 4-button SFC pad.
Within the Genesis lineup the policy stayed consistent the whole time: B = cancel, A = confirm, with C optionally working as confirm too. Why would Sega need to match Nintendo anyway?
Background and key points of this discussion
The convention that “A is the confirm button” in Japanese games didn’t take hold right from the Super Famicom’s launch — it formed gradually across multiple titles. In the thread, some argued Nintendo prioritized matching the Game Boy’s layout when deciding the A/B positions, while others held that A-as-confirm became more or less standard from Dragon Quest V onward. Meanwhile, the PlayStation’s ○/× confirm controversy stems from a separate cause: it was originally designed with ○ = confirm and × = cancel, but the Japanese spec was flipped to match the overseas standard of × for confirm — and that background became the focus of the debate. The two stories are often conflated, but their origins differ: the SFC-era “B confirms” quirk was a product of the transitional period before Nintendo established a unified rule, while the PS’s ○/× issue was a case of an already-settled rule being overturned afterward.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Super Famicom: “There Was Actually a Game Where B Was the Confirm Button”“.
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