Overview
Tomohiro Nishikado (born March 31, 1944 in Osaka) is a Japanese video game developer. Nishikado was the designer behind some of Taito's biggest arcade hits of the 1970s, including the four-player Pong variants Soccer and Davis Cup in 1973, Basketball (1974) which introduced human player sprites, the seminal racing game Speed Race (1974) which introduced vertical scrolling, the early dual-stick run & gun multi-directional shooter Western Gun (Gun Fight) in 1975, and the early FPS (first-person shooter) combat flight simulator Interceptor (1975) which introduced sprite-scaling and multi-directional scrolling.
However, he is best known as the creator of the hugely popular, seminal shoot 'em up, Space Invaders, released by Taito in 1978. The game is often credited as the first shoot 'em up, for beginning the golden age of arcade video games, establishing video games as a mainstream industry, inspiring a generation of game designers ranging from Shigeru Miyamoto to Hideo Kojima, and laying down the systems, rules and voacabulary still used by most video games through to the present day.
Following the release of Space Invaders, Nishikado was contractually prevented by Taito from revealing that he was the game’s designer. Despite his game receiving accolades worldwide (from the likes of even Steven Spielberg), Nishikado himself went mostly unnoticed at the time due to the enforced anonymity.
He later went on to develop some more arcade games at Taito, including later Space Invaders games, before leaving to start his own company, Dreams, in 1996.
External links
Log in to comment