is a Japanese video game developer and engineer. He is the creator of the arcade shoot 'em up game Space Invaders, released to the public in 1978 by the Taito Corporation of Japan, often credited as the first shoot 'em up
He joined Pacific Industries Ltd in 1968, a subsidiary of Taito Trading Company. He began working on arcade electro-mechanical games, developing the hit target shooting games Sky Fighter (1971) and Sky Fighter II. His bosses at Taito believed transistor-transistor logic (TTL) technology would play a significant role in the arcade industry, so they tasked Nishikado with investigating TTL technology as he was the company's only employee who knew how to work with integrated circuit (IC) technology, and one of the few engineers at any Japanese coin-op company with significant expertise in solid-state electronics. He was interested in creating arcade video games, so he spent six months dissecting Atari's Pong arcade unit and learning how the game's integrated circuits worked, and began modifying the game.
Best known games
Sky Fighter and Sky Fighter II
Nishikado developed Sky Fighter, a target shooting electro-mechanical game released by Taito for amusement arcades in 1971. The game used mirrors to project images of model planes in front of a moving sky-blue background from a film canister on a rotating drum. The game was a hit, but too large for most locations, so it was followed by a scaled-down version, Sky Fighter II, which sold 3,000 arcade cabinets. with Soccer developed first Davis Cup was a team sport video game, a tennis doubles game with similar ball-and-paddle gameplay to Pong but played in doubles, allowing up to four players to compete, Soccer was also a team sport video game, It also had a goal on each side. It was designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who wanted to move beyond simple rectangles to character graphics. Taito released the game in Europe as Basketball in 1974.
It was the earliest use of character sprites to represent human player characters in a video game. The gameplay was largely similar to earlier ball-and-paddle games, but with human-like characters rather than simple rectangles.
In February 1974, TV Basketball became the earliest non-American video game to be licensed for release in North America, with a deal initially made with Atari. Running on Taito Discrete Logic hardware, the game used sprites with collision detection. The game's most important innovation was its introduction of scrolling graphics, where the sprites moved along a vertical scrolling overhead track, 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. The faster the player's car drives, the more the score increases. The game's concept was adapted from two earlier electro-mechanical driving games: Kasco's Mini Drive (1958) and Taito's Super Road 7 (1970).
In contrast to the volume-control dials used in his earlier Pong-inspired machines, Speed Race had a realistic racing wheel controller,
The game received nine sequels:
- Speed Race Deluxe (1975)
- Speed Race Twin (1976)
- Super Speed Race (1977)
- Super Speed Race V (1978)
- T. T. Speed Race CL (1978)
- Speed Race CL-5 (1980)
- Super Speed Race GP V (1980)
- Super Speed Race Jr. (1985)
- Automobili Lamborghini: Super Speed Race 64 (1998)
Western Gun (Gun Fight)
His next major title was Western Gun (known as Gun Fight in the United States), released in 1975. The game is historically significant for several reasons. It was an early on-foot, multi-directional shooter, that could be played in single-player or two-player. It also introduced video game violence, being the first video game to depict human-to-human combat, and the first to depict a gun on screen. with one eight-way joystick for movement and the other for changing the shooting direction, and was one of the earliest video games to represent game characters and fragments of story through its visual presentation. and in later levels, pine trees and moving wagons, that can provide cover for the players and are destructible. The guns have limited ammunition, with each player limited to six bullets, Midway's Gun Fight adaptation was itself notable for being the first video game to use a microprocessor. Nishikado's Western Gun allowed the two players to move around anywhere on the screen, whereas Midway's version Gun Fight restricts each player to their respective portions of the screen, with the characters made larger in size. Nishikado believed that his original version was more fun, but was impressed with the improved graphics and smoother animation of Midway's version. selling 8,600 arcade cabinets in the United States, where it was the third highest-grossing arcade game of 1975 and the second highest-grossing arcade game of 1976. The game was ported to the Bally Astrocade console Gun Fight's success helped pave the way for Japanese video games in the American market. The game was first demonstrated in 1975, It involved piloting a jet fighter, using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft that move in formations of two, can scale in size depending on their distance to the player, and can move out of the player's firing range.
Space Invaders
In 1977, Nishikado began developing Space Invaders, which he created entirely on his own. In addition to designing and programming the game, he also did the artwork and sounds, and engineered the game's arcade hardware, putting together a microcomputer from scratch. Following its release in 1978, Space Invaders went on to become his most successful video game. It is frequently cited as the "first" or "original" in the shoot 'em up genre.
Space Invaders pitted the player against multiple enemies descending from the top of the screen at a constantly increasing speed. and by 1981 had grossed more than $1 billion, equivalent to $2.5 billion in 2011.
As one of the earliest shooter games, it set precedents and helped pave the way for future titles and for the shooting genre. Space Invaders popularized a more interactive style of gameplay with the enemies responding to the player controlled cannon's movement. It was also the first video game to popularize the concept of achieving a high score, being the first game to save the player's score. in addition to being the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple chromatic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, though it was dynamic and changed pace during stages. It also moved the gaming industry away from Pong-inspired sports games grounded in real-world situations towards action games involving fantastical situations. Space Invaders set the template for the shoot 'em up genre, Doom, Halo and Call of Duty.
Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto considers Space Invaders a game that revolutionized the video game industry; he was never interested in video games before seeing it, and it would inspire him to produce video games. Several publications ascribe the expansion of the video game industry from a novelty into a global industry to the success of the game, attributing the shift of video games from bars and arcades to more mainstream locations like restaurants and department stores to Space Invaders. The game's success is also credited for ending the video game crash of 1977 and beginning the golden age of video arcade games. The launch of the arcade phenomenon in North America was in part due to Space Invaders. Game Informer considers it, along with Pac-Man, one of the most popular arcade games that tapped into popular culture and generated excitement during the golden age of arcades. The game also played an important role during the second generation of consoles, when it became the Atari 2600's first killer app, establishing Atari as the market leader in the home video game market at the time.
He left Taito in 1996 to found his own company, Dreams. He personally oversaw the development of Space Invaders Revolution, released by Taito in 2005, and was involved in the development of Space Invaders Infinity Gene, released by Taito's current owner Square Enix in 2008.