Tomohiro Nishikado did not set out to design games. “I wasn’t so much looking to become a game designer as I was hoping to make the most of my electronics skills,” he told Retro Gamer. That engineering background is why Space Invaders exists in the form it does. In 1978 there was no microcomputer hardware to buy in Japan and no development environment, so he adapted a game board, wrote his own tools and made the game himself: “the planning, the design, graphics design, coding the software, building the hardware — I did entirely by myself.” Only the sound effects were someone else’s work, those of a new employee.
Fast facts
- Born: 1944; studied engineering at Tokyo Denki University.
- Company: Taito, from the late 1960s until 1996.
- Early video games: Soccer, Speed Race and TV Basketball, Western Gun (released in America by Midway as Gun Fight).
- Best-known work: Space Invaders (1978) and its sequel, Space Invaders Part II (1979).
- Later: founded the Tokyo studio Dreams in 1996.
From engineer to game designer
After university Nishikado worked for a year at an audio company, then met a former colleague who was working at Taito and recommended it. Retro Gamer says his first games for the company were electro-mechanical ones, games without screens. When Atari’s Pong reached Japan, Taito turned to video games and Nishikado went with it. “I analysed Pong and set about making new, original videogames,” he said. “I designed ten of them, including Speed Race and Western Gun. All of these games were logic IC-based designs, not microcomputer-based. I developed these games almost completely by myself.”
Several of the early ones reworked Pong’s bat and ball. In Soccer a player controlled a striker and a goalkeeper; TV Basketball (1974), Wireframe notes, drew its paddles as human players and its goals as baskets. Speed Race (1974), steered with a large wheel and seen from above, scrolled the road down the screen. Western Gun turned the paddles into two cowboys shooting at each other across the screen. Taito licensed it to Midway, which sold it in America as Gun Fight.
Space Invaders
By 1978 Nishikado had been at Taito for ten years, and he was playing Atari’s Breakout. What hooked him was “deciding on a number of targets and that sense of achievement you’d get from destroying a whole group of blocks simultaneously to clear the stage”. He replaced the bricks with targets that had “more interesting forms”, first people, until Taito’s president told him to stop, and then aliens, because Star Wars was a hit in America. He modelled them on sea creatures, with octopus shapes at the bottom, crabs in the middle and squid at the top.
Half of the game’s twelve months went on tools. He took American hardware built round the Intel 8080 “as a reference point”, remodelled an existing game board so that he could load programs into RAM from a keyboard and save them to cassette, and wrote a paint program that let him correct graphics with a light pen. Memory was so tight that the aliens had only two patterns of movement. The hardware also explains the game’s most famous effect. Wireframe describes how the 2 MHz processor redrew only what moved and updated just one invader each frame, so the fewer invaders were left, the faster they marched.
Nishikado’s colleagues in the development department played the prototype so much that he could not use his own tools to get any work done. Taito’s sales staff were less keen. Enemies that fired back, and a game that ended when the invaders landed however many shots the player had left, “were vehemently opposed by the sales and businesspeople”, he said. The game was released in July 1978 and became a craze in Japan. Nishikado has been careful about the most famous story told about it. “The effect of Space Invaders was certainly noted among businesses using 100-yen coins a lot,” he said, “but I don’t know whether the coins actually became less common because of the game.” The Space Invaders entry tells what the published figures show.
He was not satisfied with the result. “The capabilities of the Space Invaders arcade hardware were really low. I wanted to produce colourful images, but it just wasn’t possible with that hardware.” He had also wanted invaders that split up and formed groups. That idea went into Space Invaders Part II (1979), which he made when sales of the original began to fall. It was not as big a hit. Then Namco released Galaxian: “When I saw how smooth the movement was in Namco’s Galaxian, and how colourful it was, too, I remember thinking Space Invaders had lost.”
Dreams
Nishikado left Taito and in 1996 set up his own development studio, Dreams, in Tokyo. At the game’s 30th anniversary Retro Gamer described it as a 22-strong studio working for around 20 Japanese software companies, listing its games on its website only as generic descriptions such as “Action game for PS2”. Its ties to Taito continued. In 2005 Edge reported that Dreams, “headed by Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado”, was working with Marvelous and Rising Star Games on new versions of Taito’s Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands for the Nintendo DS and PSP. Retro Gamer credits Nishikado himself with Space Invaders Revolution (2005) for the DS. By 2013, Wikipedia records, he had left Dreams and was working for Taito as a technical adviser.
Retro Gamer reported that Shigeru Miyamoto has said he might not have joined the games industry without Nishikado. Nishikado’s own view of the genre he started was mixed. “In recent years, I think that such games have become too difficult and too centred on catering to enthusiasts,” he said. “I still want to make simple shooting games.”
Sources
- Retro Gamer Collection, vol. 4 (2010), pp. 247–251, Jonti Davies, “The Making of: Space Invaders”, interview with Tomohiro Nishikado: his tenth year at Taito, Tokyo Denki University, the electro-mechanical first games, Breakout, people then aliens, the sea creatures, the tools, remodelled board and light-pen paint program, two movement patterns, the colleagues playing the prototype, the sales staff’s objections, the 100-yen coin quote, colour and the split-up invaders, Part II and Galaxian, Dreams (22 staff, 1996), Space Invaders Revolution, Miyamoto, “simple shooting games”.
- Retro Gamer, issue 117, August 2013, pp. 57–62, Stuart Hunt, “Invasion of the coin snatcher”: the audio company and Taito, “I analysed Pong”, Speed Race and Western Gun as logic IC designs, Soccer and Western Gun described, release in July 1978.
- Wireframe, issue 9, March 2019, p. 32, Andrew Gillett, “Space Invaders’ disintegrating shields”: the 8080 at 2 MHz, redrawing only moving sprites, one alien updated per frame.
- Wireframe, issue 29, December 2019, pp. 50–51, “Taito’s arcade golden age”: Nishikado joining Taito in his twenties; the development tools.
- Wireframe, issue 66, September 2022, p. 22, Paul Rose: Speed Race, 1974, designed by Nishikado, steered with a wheel and scrolling vertically.
- Wireframe, issue 68, November 2022, p. 22, Paul Rose: TV Basketball, 1974, with paddles drawn as players.
- Retro Gamer, issue 112, March 2013: “Taito/Midway’s Gun Fight”. Edge, issue 116, November 2002: Taito’s Western Gun, “later renamed Gun Fight”, licensed to Midway in 1975.
- Edge, issue 154, October 2005: Rising Star Games interview on Dreams, Nishikado and the Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands updates.
- “Tomohiro Nishikado”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): birth date, 1967 graduation, the dates of Soccer (1973) and Western Gun (1975), leaving Dreams and his later role at Taito. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomohiro_Nishikado