What Color is Player 1?

In this Video I look at the various player colors used in video games

What Color is Player 2?

N64 Controller Ports Mistakes & Oddities

0:00 Intro
0:44 Mario Kart
2:17 Wii Series
2:45 Mario Party
3:39 Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games
4:11 The House of the Dead
4:34 Mortal Kombat
5:17 Street Fighter
6:31 Super Smash Bros
6:50 Minor Series
8:27 Solo Games
9:23 Sports Games
10:10 Results

Games in this video
All-Star Baseball 2000
all-Star Baseball 2001
all-Star Baseball 99
Interanatoinal track and field 200
international superstar soccer 64
Kobe Bryant NBA Courtside
Madden 2000
Madden 64
NHL 99
Army men 2
Banjo-Tooie
Buck Bumble
Conkers Bad Fur Day
Diddy Kong Racing
Dr Mario
F-Zero
F-Zero GX
Mario Party
Mario Party 2
Mario Party 3
Mario Party 4
Mario Party 5
Mario Party 6
Mario Party 7
Mario Party 8
Mario Party DS
Mario Party 9
Mario Party Island Tour
Mario Party 10
Mario Party Star Rush
Mario Party The Top 100
Super Mario Party
Mario Party Superstars
Mario Tennis
Mario Power Tennis
Mario Tennis Ultra Smash
Mario Tennis aces
Mario Golf
Mario Golf: Super Rush
Micky Speedway
Pac Man Maze Madness
pokemon stadium
pokemon stadium 2
Pokemon Puzzle league
Star fox
Star Fox: Assault
Super Smash Bros.
Melee
Brawl
Wii U
3DS
Ultimate
The New Tetris
Waverace 64
Wii Sports
Wii Sports Resort
Wii Sports Club
Nintendo Switch Sports
Wii Play
Wii Play: Motion
Wii Party
Wii Party U
Wii Music
Kirby AIRRIDE
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Games!
Game & Warrio
WarioWare: Get It Together
Mario strikers
Mario strikers charged
Mario Strikers Battle
Mortal Combat 1
Mortal Combat 2
Mortal Combat 3
Mortal Combat Trilogy
Mortal Combat 4
Mortal combat Gold
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
Mortal Kombat: Deception
Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe
Mortal Combat 9
Mortal Kombat X
Mortal Kombat 11
Street fighter 2
Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition
Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting
Super Street fighter 2
Super Street fighter 2 Turbo
Street Fighter Alpha
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Street Fighter :The Movie
X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Street Fighter EX
Street Fighter EX 2
Street Fighter EX 3
Street Fighter III: New Generation
Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter
Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact
Street Fighter III 3rd Strike
Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition
Street Fighter 4
street fighter 5
Super Mario Kart
Mario Kart 64
Mario Kart Super Circuit
Mario Kart Double Dash
Mario Kart Wii
Mario Kart 8
Mario kart 8 deluxe
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
super street fighter iv
Street Fighter X Tekken
Street Fighter V
Ultra Street Fighter 2 The Final Challengers
The House of the Dead
The House of the Dead 2
The House of the Dead: Overkill
The House of the Dead EX
Typing of the Dead: Overkill
The House of the Dead 3
The House of the Dead 4
House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn
The House of the Dead: Remake
Donkey Konga
Donkey Konga 2
Mario Sonic Olympics
Mario Sonic Olympics 2010
Mario Sonic Olympics 2012
Mario Sonic Olympics 2014
Mario Sonic Olympics 2016
Mario Sonic Olympics 2020
Nintendo Land

Merch
Twitter

#videogames
#player
#smash

[jojo-yzqf]

I love how in the intro all the wiimotes are shaking slightly as if everyone were just shaking in fear at the horror of color inconsistency

[cmyk]

I grew up on Wii, so 🔵🔴🟢🟡 is my most familiar player color assignment. Some fun facts I can contribute:
• Just Dance 1 used 🔴🔵🟡🟢, but Just Dance 2 switched over to 🔵🔴🟢🟣 (purple instead of yellow), and the series does to this day, extended with yellow and pink for 5P and 6P if available.
• The Wii player colors are also in the same order as the colored buttons you can see on Japanese TV remotes! Some programs have interactive content, and will invite viewers to answer quizzes using the four colored options in real time through Data Broadcasting (データ放送).

[Plutoniumcube]

I always noticed the shuffling of red and blue. I personally always thought that since blue is meant to be more relaxed than red, it’s player 1 in more aggressive games like Smash, whereas player 1 is blue in more relaxed games like Wii Sports. But, it seems like there is actually a lot of variance that bucks that trend.

[SamwellWK]

You did mention Kirby Air Ride, but I want to expand a bit to the Kirby series in general. While the colors of P3 and P4 can vary, it's pretty much universal for P1 to be pink and P2 to be yellow. In games, this traces all the way back to Kirby's Dream Course on the SNES, and is presumably a result of initial considerations of what color Kirby was going to be when they were designing him: Sakurai always envisioned him as pink, while Miyamoto when seeing initial drafts of him thought he would be yellow. Because of Kirby's Dream Course, Kirby fans tend to consistently refer to Yellow Kirby as "Keeby", since that was Yellow Kirby's name in Dream Course.

During the GBA/DS era, it was common for P3 to be red and P4 to be green, as established in Nightmare in Dream Land and Kirby & The Amazing Mirror. This would continue with little variation until Kirby's Return to Dream Land, which basically standardized P3 as blue and P4 as green for the rest of the series going forward from there.

[GlorySnowstar]

Now THIS is a cool subject. I'd love to hear about how color theory plays into this, considering red = activity and blue = chill.

[SnufflySpy]

0:11 The fact that almost no remotes were at full battery is the most wiimote thing ever

[TeknoThom]

I’m surprised you didn’t bring up 8-Player Smash for Wii U and Ultimate as they have four extra colours for when you play with more players. These are: Orange, Cyan, Purple, and Black.

[hi-i-am-atan]

here's a fun one: in the original doom games, the colors go green, """"indigo"""" ( it's just grey ), brown, and red

i imagine this is by-and-large because of the palette they ended up using. doom naturally has a lot of red, grey, and brown owing to all the gore, machinery, and fleshy creatures ( and level features ), so it'd just as naturally have a lot of the palette committed to those colors. so when swapping out palette indices for multiplayer, the choices were kinda just made for them

there's also a p. significant blue range that they _could've_ used ... but as anyone who's played a significant amount of doom ports that allows for custom player colors _without_ switching to a true color renderer can tell you, the gradient looks kinda gross on the player sprites. especially when in dark areas. i kinda figure they were originally gonna use that range for player 2, hence calling them color indigo, but they changed their mind after seeing it in action and just went with what was left instead

[Jonnil]

I always liked the Wii colors, Player 1 is blue, Player 2 is red, Player 3 is green, and Player 4 is yellow. I always liked if there was a system wide standardization of the player colors to keep it consistent, so a lot of games used those colors, even games outside of Nintendo use these. But I think just because of Smash Bros sheer popularity they get swapped a lot

[mablungbalrog]

The player color scheme matches how languages develop names for colors. There's a paper written by Paul Kay and Brent Berlin about the order in which languages develop words to distinguish between colors. Languages almost always start off with words differentiating Black, White, and Red, and then as the languages develop, they'll most likely develop words in the order Yellow and/or Green, Blue, Brown, and then a mix between Gray Purple Orange Pink and so on.
This color order supports the colors used in 4-player games, Red Blue Green and Yellow are all the first colors differentiated by languages and so are used for the 4 players, whereas later developed colors like orange and pink are used far less. Although, there is a bit of a catch where blue is actually developed AFTER green and yellow in languages, and yet it typically comes BEFORE in player order.

[ryancurtis]

Also in Mario Party 7, there's an 8 Player mode, but the way they do 8 player is weird. You're on teams and two players share a controller, with Player 1 using L and the analog stick, and Player 2 using R and the C-Stick. As for the colors, they're shared between teammates but one game in particular, Bumper to Bumper, gives each player they're own color. Team 1 is red and pink, team 2 is blue and cyan, team 3 is green and lime, and team 4 is yellow and orange. Also of note is the notation for teammates on the select screen goes P#-1 and P#-2.

[alxjones]

Star Fox 64 is an example of color associated to characters. In the single-player campaign, the boxes around each characters portrait when speaking are yellow, red, green, blue for Fox, Peppy, Slippy, and Falco, respectively. Those colors also match a color associated to each of the characters, with Fox, Slippy, and Falco matching their body color, and Peppy matching his clothing color.

[Kyango]

Here's my logic...

-There are two main sets of primary colors (RBY and RGB).
-Red and Blue are common to both sets, thus they are player 1 or 2.
-Green and Yellow are the remaining primaries, thus they are player 3 or 4.
-Secondary Colors are either Green/Orange/Purple or Yellow/Cyan/Magenta.
-Orange and purple are in the standard colors of the rainbow and thus win out for player 5 or 6.
-This leaves Cyan and Magenta as players 7 or 8.
-For me, the shortest wavelength gets the tiebreaker, therefore the correct order is...

P1 Blue / P2 Red
P3 Green / P4 Yellow
P5 Purple / P6 Orange
P7 Cyan / P8 Magenta

You are free to invert the order of each tier if you wish, but otherwise this is objectively the correct order. 😛

[tomysshadow]

I would've associated blue more with player one. Especially in shooters, blue usually represents "the good guys" a.k.a your team, while red is the enemy team. So it makes sense for blue to be the default, player one colour. Interesting that the majority of games actually assign red to player one.

[ZtotheMills]

Red as a striking color is always easy to use as the color to represent 1. And while I agreed on this originally, I would gradually associate Blue with P1, as Red more strongly suits the 'Enemy' or 'Opponent', making it a more natural fit for P2.
Now for me, P3 as Yellow makes a lot of sense, as it rounds off the Primary Colors being 1, 2, and 3 respectively. With Green just being there to fill in as 4. Yet still, Yellow as 4 always felt more right to me.

[ImAbokai]

I think one of the reasons why P1 is Yellow in Mario Kart 8 is because Yellow is the brightest color out of all the colors, so they probably just wanted P1 to stand out among the rest.

Though i can't really say that's a reason Nintendo actually thought about, because P2 is Blue, the darkest one out of everything, and then colors get brighter for P3 and P4 (red is the third brightest and green second brightest). If they really had brightness in mind, they would've used Green for P2 and Blue for P4, resulting in a gradual decrease of brightness as players keep joining in, so the fact that they didn't makes this scenario unlikely, but it's still interesting to think about.

[Simalf]

I like how Snooplax changes the background accordingly to the games.

[skapokonroll]

I think my favorite player colors come from the first Worms games due to how unique they are. White, yellow, blue and red! Next games had a more conventional color system with red, blue, green and yellow (and cyan and pink in the games that allowed for 6 players), but in those they added team systems meaning any player can be any color they want

[Thoomas]

I thought I was the only one who ever paid attention to this. I grew up with the DS and later Wii, so Blue1/Red2/Green3/Yellow4 is burned into my mind and it always seems off when it's a different order. I remember seeing this in Mario & Sonic and being very confused, as up until that point I'd only really seen the order I grew up with.


Kinda sad you didn't bring up 8 Player Smash, which adds some more funky colors into the mix.

[SandwitchZebra]

I find it interesting how Smash Bros’s eight player smash mode pretty much assimilates all other multiplayer color schemes that don’t fit the RBGY standard. P5 was orange and P6 was teal in both games. P7 was purple and P8 was dark grey in SSBWIIU, while in Ultimate it was shifted to have P7 be pink while P8 was purple.

Smash Bros really is a celebration of gaming, it’s even used pretty much every multiplayer color ever!