Control Freak: The Start Button
Author:
Yup, I’m a control freak. I’m obsessed with controllers and user interfaces, so I decided to create a little recurring column just to talk about them.
Today I thought I’d talk about a particular controller feature that I’ve always been fascinated with: The START button. It’s been featured on the controllers of almost every console for more than 20 years and I’m pretty sure it started with the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Early NES games featured primitive menus that were navigated by cycling through the options with the SELECT button and signifying your choice by pressing START. This was a holdover to similar buttons located on the body of consoles like the Atari 2600.
At some point, developers realized that the other controls on the pad were perfectly capable of performing these tasks - the d-pad allowed the player to move the selection cursor down and up (!) and the A and B buttons were more comfortable to press and the B button and gave players a “back button” to return to previous menus. All in all, it made menu navigation work much like playing the game itself. The START button continued to be used for its secondary purpose of pausing the game (which is consistent with the dual-purpose PLAY/PAUSE buttons found on modern stereo equipment) and, as more advanced games required more sophisticated controls, the SELECT button was quickly relegated to other tasks.
Technically, the START button did retain its original purpose - most games had a title screen that simply said “Press Start”, which the player had to do in order to get to the menu. This is a bit of an odd design decision, though. Since the title screen will only accept one input, any button could be used. It seems like it would be simpler to display the message “Press ANY Button” and accept any input accordingly. That would at least save novice players from having to hunt for the (usually tiny, out of the way) START button. The only reason I can think of for these screens to exist as they do is to justify the labeling of the START button as it is.
And label it as such they did, as one controller after another featured the eventually ubiquitous START button. Meanwhile, its pause functionality was, in most games, expanded to include a menu that would pop up when the game was paused. One of the most common items on this menu was EXIT or QUIT, allowing the player to go back to the main menu. In other words, even though the START buttons wasn’t really neccessary to start games, it was being tasked to pause and stop games. Yet every major console developer continued to label it START and force users to press it at the title screen for no reason!
It is ironic, yet ultimately unsurprising, that the first company to release a major console without a START button on the controller is the same company that started it all: Nintendo. The simple, streamlined controller of the Wii features no button marked START. But as I play my newly downloaded copy of Tetris Party I decide, mid-game, that I want to try a different game mode…
How do you pause the game? How do you bring up the menu to quit?
I can press the little blue house button, but that menu only allows me to exit all the back to the Wii menu, which isn’t what I want to do. It turns out that, in order to duplicate that START button functionality, I’m supposed to press the (+) button. Yeah, that’s intuitive. Given that the START button, however mis-named it might be, has been very usefully employed for pausing the game and bringing up menus in pretty much every single console game in over 20 years, you might think that Nintendo would find it sufficiently important to put a button marked PAUSE or MENU on their controller.
After all, the (+) and (-) buttons aren’t even very useful. They’re primary use is to flip channels in the entirely underwhelming Wii channel sytem, but this is obviously a very specialized purpose that isn’t applicable to any games and, like the SELECT button before it, the functionality can easily and intuitively be duplicated by the D-pad (which is used for channel surfing on many modern TV remotes anyway). Considering Nintendo’s obvious attempt to aggressively strip away unneccessary controls, its hard to understand why they chose to add these buttons and not a PAUSE or MENU button.
Its actually one of many UI decisions on the Wii that leave me scratching my head. But its a mistake that Nintendo made, and Nintendo is on top again so, if history is any indication, we should be seeing lots of controllers with useless (+)(-) buttons on them. Then again, maybe if the new motion detection controls being developed by Microsoft and Sony take off, we just won’t have any more buttons to mislabel!