Tomohiro Nishikado
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 of Japan, often credited as the first shoot 'em up and for beginning the golden age of arcade video games. Prior to Space Invaders, he also designed other earlier Taito arcade games, including the shooting electro-mechanical games Sky Fighter (1971) and Sky Fighter II, the sports video game TV Basketball in 1974, the vertical scrolling racing video game Speed Race (also known as Wheels) in 1974, the multi-directional shooter Western Gun (also known as Gun Fight) in 1975, and the first-person combat flight simulator Interceptor (1975). Early life and career Tomohiro Nishikado was born in 1944. He began conducting his own science experiments at an early age and, in junior high school, started working with electronics by building radios and amplifiers. He graduated with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1967. He had originally planned to work for Sony, but failed the final round of the company's testing process, so he instead joined an audio engineering company called Takt in early 1967. But after completing his training there he was not put in the development department, so he quit a year later and looked for a new job, eventually accepting a job offer from a communications company. Before beginning work, he met an old colleague at a train station who told him about the work he was doing at Taito, which Nishikado found interesting. His friend told him that Taito were desperately searching for new engineers, so Nishikado decided to join Taito instead of the communications company. 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 began working on video game development in 1972. 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. He developed Elepong (similar to Pong), one of Japan's earliest locally produced arcade video games, released in 1973. He produced more than ten video games up until 1977, before Space Invaders was released in 1978. 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