Tomohiro Nishikado (西角 友宏, Nishikado Tomohiro, born March 31, 1944 in Osaka) is a Japanese video game developer. He is best known as the creator of the shooter game, Space Invaders, released to the public in 1978 by the Taito Corporation of Japan and often considered the first shoot 'em up.^[1]

Originally Nishikado wanted to use airplanes as enemies for Space Invaders, but would have encountered problems making them move smoothly due to the limited computing power at the time (the game was based on Intel's 8 bit 8080 microprocessor). Humans would have been easier to render, but management at Taito forbade the use of human targets.

Prior to Space Invaders, he was also the designer for many of Taito's earlier hits, including the early team sport games Soccer and Davis Cup in 1973, the early scrolling racing video game Speed Race in 1974,^[2] and the early dual-stick on-foot multi-directional shooter^[3] Western Gun in 1975.^[4]

Biography

Nishikado graduated with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1968. He joined Taito Trading Company in 1969. After working on mechanical games, in 1972, he developed Elepong (similar to Pong), one of Japan's earliest locally-produced video arcade games, released in 1973. He produced over 10 video games before Space Invaders was released in 1978. He left Taito in 1996 to found his own company, Dreams.^[5][6][7]

One of his first original titles was Speed Race, an early black-and-white car racing video game, released in 1974.^[2] The game introduced collision detection and an overhead vertical scrolling view,^[8] with the course width becoming wider or narrower as the player's car moves up the road, while the player races against other rival cars, more of which appear as the score increases. It also featured an early racing wheel controller interface with an accelerator, gear shift, speedometer and tachometer. It could be played in either single-player or alternating two-player, where each player attempts to beat the other's score.^[9] The game was re-branded as Racer by Midway Games for released in the United States and was influential on later racing games.^[8]

His next major title was Western Gun, released in 1975.^[4] It was an early two-player, on-foot, multi-directional shooter, which was also the first video game to depict a gun on screen, introduced dual-stick controls with one joystick for movement and the other for changing the shooting direction,^[10] and was the first known video game to feature game characters and fragments of story through its visual presentation.^[11]

His most famous video game was 1978's seminal Space Invaders, which is frequently cited as the "first" or "original" in the shoot 'em up genre,^[12][1][13] and was responsible for making the shooter game genre became prolific. Space Invaders pitted the player against multiple enemies descending from the top of the screen at a constantly increasing rate of speed.^[13] The game used alien creatures inspired by The War of the Worlds because the developers were unable to render the movement of aircraft; in turn, the aliens replaced human enemies because of moral concerns (regarding the portrayal of killing humans) on the part of Taito. As with subsequent shoot 'em ups of the time, the game was set in space as the available technology only permitted a black background. The game also introduced the idea of giving the player a number of "lives". Space Invaders was a massive commercial success, causing a coin shortage in Japan.^[14][15] Space Invaders popularized a more interactive style of gameplay with the enemies responding to the player controlled cannon's movement.^[16] It was the first video game to have an intermission between gameplay, and to popularize the concept of achieving a high score.^[17][18][19]

References

External links

• Article at The Dot Eaters, on Nishikado and a history of Space Invaders.
• Partial list of games credited to Nishikado.

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