The origin of PlayStation controller's button

If you’ve owned any of the PlayStation consoles (the original PlayStation or PSX, the PS2, the PS3 and the PSP) then you’ve seen the button scheme that they’ve been using on their controllers. Instead of having A-B-C X-Y-Z like what Nintendo did with their controllers, Sony stuck with a colorful and much more recognizable scheme.

PlayStation designer Teiyu Goto explains why. Just who is Teiyu Goto? Well he’s none other than the father of the PlayStation, the man behind the designs for the original PlayStation, the PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation 3!

So why shapes and colors? In an interview with Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, it’s all about keeping things simple.

“That was…pretty tough,” he says. “Other game companies at the time assigned alphabet letters or colors to the buttons. We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols, and I came up with the triangle-circle-X-square combination immediately afterward. I gave each symbol a meaning and a color.”

“The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink. The circle and X represent ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision-making and I made them red and blue respectively. People thought those colors were mixed up, and I had to reinforce to management that that’s what I wanted.”

Source: http://www.atmaxplorer.com/2010/08/decoding-the-playstation-controllers-buttons/

Rubik's Cube Facts

Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik, a Hungarian architect and sculptor. He called his invention the "Magic Cube". It was renamed the Rubik's Cube by the Ideal Toy Corporation in 1980.

More than 300 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold worldwide. If all the cubes were placed on top of each other it would be enough to reach the North Pole from the South Pole!

Rubik applied for his Hungarian patent in January 1975 and left his invention with a small toy making cooperative in Budapest. The patent approval finally came in early 1977 and the first Cubes appeared at the end of 1977. By this time, Erno Rubik was married.

Ernő Rubik became the first self-made millionaire from the communist block and it took Erno Rubik one month to solve the cube for the first time.

The Cube has 43 quintillion different possible configurations (43,252,003,274,489,856,000 to be precise) and only ONE solution.

Board Games Invention

The oldest board game in the world is Senet appeared in ancient Egypt in 3300 b.c. Even King Tut had one. He liked it so much he was buried with it.

The oldest set of board gaming equipment ever found is The Royal Game of Ur, which was invented more than 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the site of present-day Iraq. It was a “race” game where the first player to complete the course was the winner. Moves were governed by throwing dice-like objects. Archaeologists believe it is the forerunner of backgammon.

Parcheesi, the original male chauvinist game, was created in the 1500s in India by Akbar the Great. It was played in the palace courtyard where Akbar would sit in the middle with slave girls dressed in different colors as game pawns.

The first American board game, “The Mansion of Happiness,” was produced in 1843. Its theme was Victorian: players tried to avoid Passion, Idleness, Cruelty, Immodesty, and Ingratitude. Drunkenness was punished by a trip to the stocks.

In 1860, Milton Bradley bought a lithographic press and began printing board games. His first game was called “The Checkered Game of Life.” The object was to land on the "good" spaces and collect 100 points. A player could gain fifty points toward this goal by reaching "Happy Old Age" in the far corner, opposite "Infancy" where one began. The game board was essentially a modified checkerboard.

In 1885, Mark Twain designed and patented a game intended to help people keep historical facts straight. He called it “Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates. In the introduction to the rules he wrote, “Many public school children seem to know only two dates - 1492 and 4th of July but as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion. It is because they have not had a chance to play this game.

Monopoly was invented by Charles B. Darrow during the Depression in 1934 and at first, the game was rejected by the Parker Brothers due 52 design errors. In its first year, 1935, game was the best-selling game in America. Standard Monopoly bank starts with $15,140 and it is estimated that Monopoly has been sold 250 million times through out the world. Mr. Monopoly is the name of the Monopoly® man.

Source: http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/en_US/