The SNES should have had ZL and ZR instead of X and Y

This was mostly written on April 14, 2024, mostly written and only unveiled August 12, 2024.

Status: not quite done quite yet.

A quick history of SNES video-game controllers and controllers that came before

You might remember the controller for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In case you don’t, just search for “snes controller” in your favorite image-search engine. You want the one with a D-pad (shaped like a plus sign), Select, Start, and four face buttons arranged like so:

 X
Y A
 B

Multicolor vs. two-tone purple doesn’t matter. The Japanese got the multicolor one, while we here in the US got light purple concave Y and X buttons paired with darker-purple convex B and A buttons.

I’d provide you with search-engine links, but I’m kind of in between search engines at the moment. Your favorite one should suffice for all this.

What you might not notice in photos of these things were the L and R buttons on the top of the controller, meant to be pressed with the index fingers.

By contrast, the controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System didn’t have Y and X buttons. It didn’t have L or R buttons, either. All it had, from left to right, was the D-pad, Select, Start, B, and A.

Over on the Sega side of things, the Genesis released with only four buttons plus a D-pad: Start, A, B, and C (X, Y, and Z would only show up much later, when Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II got ported to the system). Its predecessor, the Sega (Master?) System, had only two buttons in addition to the D-pad — 1 and 2. If you wanted to pause the console, you had to get up off the couch or whatever and press a very hardware-y pause button on the console itself. The thing seemed to stop execution, not merely trigger something that would conventionally pause the game.

The argument (mostly for ZL/ZR)

Now that you’ve been brought up to speed on what’s been seen by world+dog in 1990, it’s time to get into the meat of the matter.

• Instead of having two more face buttons (Y and X), the SNES controller should have had two middle-finger buttons (what we’d call ZL and ZR today).

• The two face buttons — still B and A — should have been angled so they were where the Y and B buttons were, like so:

B
 A

The main reason? So a player can press all buttons (except Select and Start) independently, comfortably.

Let me explain.

Many SNES games tended to have two primary buttons, one secondary button, and a handful of quaternary-and-higher buttons. B and Y ended up as the two primary buttons, and A ended up being the secondary button that you needed to shift your right thumb a bit to use. Some examples:

Super Mario World:

• B: jump
• Y: run/shoot fireball
• A: spin jump

Super Metroid:

• B: jump
• Y: shoot
• A: run

Mega Man X:

• B: jump
• Y: shoot
• A: dash

F-Zero:

• B: gas
• Y: brake
• A: boost

Have another look at the diagram:

 X
Y A
 B

With this button arrangement, you can’t press Y, A, and B all at the same time unless you shift your right hand to press these buttons with your index, middle, and ring fingers. Normally, you have the base of your thumb on the A button and the tip of your thumb on the Y button, which is much more comfortable.

Now, let’s imagine what control schemes would be for a SNES controller like the one I’m proposing (reproduced so you don’t have to scroll back to see it again). Not shown are the L and R buttons, pressed by the index fingers, and the ZL and ZR buttons, pressed by the middle fingers. (The Z buttons, in modern times, get their name because the Nintendo 64 sai-shaped controller had a Z button under the thumbstick.)

B
 A

Super Mario World:

• B: run/throw fireball
• A: jump
• L, R: scroll screen
• ZR: spin jump

Earthbound:

• B: do stuff
• A: back out
• L: do stuff
• ZL: back out

(Earthbound let you use the controller one-handed, but Select was the left-hand-only back-out button, which is awkward. I’m left-handed anyway, so it’s not like I could draw maps with my freed-up hand. I didn’t use this feature much.)

Super Metroid:

• B: shoot
• A: jump
• L: aim up 45°
• ZL: aim down 45°
• R: next weapon
• ZR: run
• Select: item cancel (go back to the normal blaster)

Mega Man X:

• B: shoot
• A: jump
• L: previous weapon
• R: next weapon
• ZL: …switch back to Mega Buster?
• ZR: dash

F-Zero:

• B: brake
• A: gas
• L: tilt left
• R: tilt right
• ZL: boost
• ZR: boost

(I could imagine swapping brake and boost here.)

Doom:

• B: use
• A: shoot
• L: previous weapon
• R: next weapon
• ZL: turn left
• ZR: turn right

(the D-pad would move forward/backward and strafe left/right.)

Castlevania IV:

B: jump

A: whip

L: use special weapon

(Castlevania IV got the right idea before anyone else.)

Why rotate B and A

There was an NES re-release after the SNES came out that uses the SNES’s design language, so to speak. You can see a picture of it here:

See how the B and A buttons are angled? While the buttons take into account the angle that the player’s thumb is likely to be in, the line that the buttons are on is perpendicular to the line that the thumb is in. This might work better in general with NES games, but I still figure the buttons should point downward from left to right, not upward.

So what

You’ve probably learned something about how nice it is to be able to push all different kinds of buttons at the same time, especially from a game-designer perspective.

Also, if you’re thinking of planning on making a retro indie console system yourself and want some good differentiation from the Playdate…

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