The Super Nintendo brought with it a whole host of new features and abilities, and some of those were tied to the controllers for the system. While the NES had A/B/Select/Start and a d-pad, the Super Nintendo really stepped things up with a ton of buttons. The A/B face buttons from the NES were joined by X/Y this time around, which is a design Nintendo has stuck with to this day.
There are plenty of gamers nowadays who wonder why Nintendo went with A/B/X/Y instead of something like A/B/C/D. Turns out we actually got the answer to this decades ago, and it came straight from a Nintendo Power issue.
Dug up by Sasha’s Retrobytes on Blusky, an old issue of Nintendo Power included a letter from a fan looking to get some insight into the A/B/X/Y decision. Nintendo Power published the question and offered up a direct answer as well, finally putting the mystery to rest.
Turns out the A/B/X/Y decision was tied to the use of CAD software, which is used by designers, architects, and engineers to create 2D and 3D digital models and drawings of products. In CAD software, A/B are labeled as primary buttons, while X/Y are secondary. Nintendo took this CAD approach and applied it to the face buttons on the SNES controller, and the rest is history!
