Bring back the start and select buttons

The title screen for Super Mario Bros. features the options to start a 1 player game or a 2 player game, but pressing up or down on the NES’ d-pad does nothing; instead the select is used to select which choice the player will make before hitting the start button to begin. The NES controller has two different conceptual spaces: The d-pad and face buttons are for controlling gameplay, while the start and select buttons, relegated to the more out-of-the-way middle space of the controller are for more metatextual, system-level inputs. The Famicon’s second controller didn’t even have start and select buttons, only being purely concerned with the gameplay space and not the system space.

This convention did not last long as games became more complex and context switching between different screens, different contexts and different levels of abstraction became a normal part of games and using the d-pad and face buttons to navigate menus and options became the norm. The select button became instead a useful, general-purpose auxiliary button. Something not used as part of normal gameplay rhythms but for things like opening a map or menu screen separate from the start button, which generally also served to pause and open a pause menu if one exists.

But despite the labels being somewhat of a holdover the labels stuck, at least for a while. The NES, SNES, Game Boy, PSX, PS2 and PS3 all had start and select buttons. The Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast, N64 and Gamecube all had start buttons. Even if different consoles had different conventions for how to label their face buttons at least everyone agreed on what to call the auxiliary buttons in the middle of the controller, whether there was one or two of them.

Microsoft broke this convention with the Xbox, using using the label “back” instead of “select”, with a glyph of left-pointing triangle to mirror the one for the start button, itself borrowing from Sony’s use of a play button symbol for start. Select had long since stopped making sense as anything other than convention, but calling it the back button was hardly any better as a label for how the second central auxiliary button was used in games and this divergence would be the start of a complete breakdown in convention.

Nintendo, the originators of the convention in the first place, started assigning + and - symbols to the start and select buttons, respectively, and then moved to simply calling the buttons + and - entirely. The PS4 moved to options and share and PS5 to options and create, while the newer Xbox consoles have gone with menu and view, with Valve following suit for the Steam Deck and second Steam Controller (though they’ve gone with Sony’s conventions for labelling of shoulder buttons). No one can agree what to call these things any more and while start and select were not ideal labels for what the buttons were actually used for I don’t think these other names are any better and I am probably just going to keep calling them start and select forever.

Also the shift to making face buttons monochrome is fascist I will not elaborate on this.