How Tomohiro Nishikado created Space Invaders 46 years ago | exclusive interview

Tomohiro Nishikado created a global entertainment and gaming phenomenon 46 years ago.

He built Space Invaders, the now classic arcade game that changed arcades. It started a transformation that shifted the content in arcades from casual pinball machines to tense and challenging arcade machines that fought back against the player.

While video games may now take several thousand developers to build, Nishikado designed the technology and the game by himself in about 18 months. Japan’s Taito, now part of Square Enix, released the game in Japan in April, 1978, and Midway Manufacturing released it overseas.

Nishikado, now 80, spoke with me about the creation of the game. He struck me as a very humble man. But he should be very proud as an elder statesman of the game industry.

The cultural influence and impact of Space Invaders is immeasurable. In gaming, it was the first fixed shooter game and the first one with endless gameplay with no final level. The music was tense and it sent an endless wave of aliens against you as the pace picked up faster and faster. It inspired other developers like Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo game designer, to make video games.

“Space Invaders reshaped the arcade. When it came out, it dominated. Pinball machines were once the backbone of the arcade. After Space Invaders, it was all videogames,” said Jonathan Ackley, a professional game designer who co-created The Curse of Monkey Island, in a message to GamesBeat. “When Taito launched to game in 1978, it became so popular that it sucked up so many 100-yen coins, that Japan endured a coin shortage. The Japanese mint had to triple production of the coin to meet demand. Then the Space Invaders conquered America.”

Nishikado had no idea this would happen, but his work and those of other pioneers at Atari and elsewhere drove the industry inexorably (and cyclically) in an endless wave to become a $183.9 billion global industry (according to market researcher Newzoo). It’s bigger as an industry than movies and music combined.

The Netflix 2020 documentary, High Scores, noted that arcades in the early wave of Space Invaders rebranded themselves as Space Invader houses in Japan.

In just four years, the game had generated $3.8 billion in quarters, according to the book Game On! Video Game History From Pong and Pac-Man to Mario, Minecraft and more. One estimate noted that the game may have generated $13 billion over time, or $31 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

“When Space Invaders released in 1978, its arrival was thunderous. It was different from most arcade games of the time with distinctly identifiable characters, increasing difficulty within each level, and otherworldly, reverberating sounds,” said Chris Melissinos, a classic video game fan and creator of The Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in a message to GamesBeat.

Space Invaders was also a technical triumph. We didn’t get into this in the interview, but Nishikado said in prior interviews he studied the nascent technology of microprocessors (first introduced by Intel in 1971 with the 4004, which had only 2,300 transistors compared to 208 billion transistors in Nvidia’s latest AI chip).

Microprocessors, then rarely used in Japan, had many elements of a computer on a single chip. He had to take the processor, memory and other components and assemble them on a board as a microcomputer to run the arcade game. He had to create programming tools for the game and program the firmware in the ROM storage units and create his own random access memory for storing the instructions. The work wasn’t purely about creative game design, but it was also pioneering in that way. Fortunately, he had studied assembly language during his university days.

“Its design, elegant and strategic gameplay, and memorable characters has enabled Space Invaders to remain as one of the most iconic arcade games in history,” Melissinos said.

Nishikado was inspired in part by Atari’s Breakout game, which had a paddle that moved back and forth using a joystick. And he was always passionate since childhood about handcrafting things. Even as a child, he made a pinball machine. In junior high, he made radios and amplifiers. And he kept thinking about a game that became harder and harder the more you played it.

An homage to Space Invaders was created by an artist named Invader and it was carried by an astronaut up to the International Space Station.

I had a chance to interview Nishikado after Jeff Hardy’s Floor 84 Studio contacted me about a new playable watch they’re creating, the Space Invaders: My Play Watch, which is launching a Kickstarter campaign today. I was amazed that tech had advanced so much that Floor 84 could put a version of the game on a smartwatch. Nishikado said he believes technology for graphics will one day hit a wall. But he expressed optimism about games.

“I feel like we’ll see another game that will change the game for this industry. I’m excited to see it, he said.

I spoke to Nishikado through an online connection to him at Taito’s offices in Tokyo. He spoke through an interpreter.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What was the period of time when you worked on Space Invaders?

Tomohiro Nishikado: It took about one and a half years, including the period where I had to create the tools for development.

GamesBeat: Do you recall when you first had the idea for the game?

Nishikado: At the beginning, it goes back to early 1977. That’s when Breakout was released by Atari and became a big hit in Japan. I was inspired by that game. The idea was, how could we one-up Breakout? We didn’t start with the idea to make a space-themed game.

GamesBeat: It does seem similar to the way Breakout plays, with the paddle that goes back and forth.

Nishikado: It’s true, there are similar features like that.

GamesBeat: Is there any actual lore or story behind the Space Invaders game, a narrative? Is there a backstory?

Nishikado: At the beginning the game wasn’t themed around space. Later we came up with the idea of incorporating aliens and defending the earth from them. That was the beginning of the narrative.

GamesBeat: This is obviously a lot of work for one person to do. Where did your technical and creative passion come from?

Nishikado: As a child and throughout my life, I’ve always been passionate about creating things and handcrafting. When I was a child, my father used to work on creating and fixing tools for carpenters. Our house was full of equipment and tools for his job. As a child I made a lot of things, including pinball machines. Once I became a junior high school student, I got more interested in electronics as well. I made radios and amplifiers. I pursued that passion throughout high school and university, and I majored in a related subject. So I’ve always been passionate about that kind of thing.

GamesBeat: The game gets harder and harder and never ends. How much emphasis did you want to put on the player’s skill in your design?

Nishikado: Making a game that gets harder and harder is something I always kept in my mind. There are two reasons for that. The first one was to keep the game fresh, to keep a pleasant tension on the player’s end, to make them replay again and again. When they fail they want to try again. That tension is very helpful to make people come back to the game again. That’s the first reason. The second reason is simply because it was an arcade machine. The more income the better. If you let people stay in front of the cabinet and play for a very long time, the sales and marketing department wouldn’t be very happy about that.

GamesBeat: How did the concept evolve during the design process? Did you have to design and redesign the game over and over?

Nishikado: The concept went through some revisions in the process, yes. At the beginning we started with the idea of incorporating tanks, actually. But that didn’t work well. It didn’t behave well on the screen. Then we tried battleships, and that didn’t work either. The next thing I tried was warriors, maniples, and that actually worked pretty well on the screen, but someone pointed out that shooting people on the screen wouldn’t look very good. At around the same time the first Star Wars movie was about to be released in Japan, so I thought that maybe space would be a trend. We tried using space and aliens on the screen and that worked pretty well. We added some more elements like the bunker shields at the bottom of the screen, and the UFOs across the top. That’s how it evolved over time.

GamesBeat: Looking inside arcade machines, there are a lot of chips and wiring. How much of your job was technical, understanding the electronics hardware?

Nishikado: In the early days, the technical element of game development was pretty heavy. That’s still true. But as soon as you come up with an idea, it’s important to make sure that the game is exciting. That’s 80 percent of what’s important in the whole game development process. When it comes to technology, as soon as you have a clear concept and you’re sure that excitement is there, that’s more important than the technology behind it.

GamesBeat: This wasn’t your first game. What had you done in games before Space Invaders?

Nishikado: When I first joined the company there was no such thing as video games. I started out working on mechanical games. Then video games came to Japan. I studied and analyzed games a lot. I created my first game, which was Soccer, and then the next one was Speed Race. I also created a shooting game, Western Gun. All told there were about 10 games that I made before Space Invaders.

GamesBeat: What did you learn beforehand that helped you design Space Invaders and make it such a successful game?

Nishikado: Before Space Invaders came out, games were pretty much relying on hardware, on IC chips. But for Space Invaders we created a computer where you did programming to run the game. Learning assembly language when I was at university was pretty helpful. And all the games I created before Space Invaders were part of what helped this game become such a long-lasting game. Space Invaders stood on all the experience and knowledge that I’d earned beforehand.

GamesBeat: Can you describe your career in gaming after Space Invaders?

Nishikado: After Space Invaders I continued to work in the development department for two or three years, I believe. After that I moved to another newly-created department. I was the head of that department. There, we were creating consumer games. I was in a management position, though, not doing very much actual game development. It wasn’t as fascinating as actually making games. After that I left Taito and established a game development company of my own. I ran that for about 10 years before I transferred ownership to another party and came back to Taito again. Now I’m here as an executive advisor.

GamesBeat: You inspired Shigeru Miyamoto to make games. What is it like to hear that from people in the game industry who came after you?

Nishikado: Shigeru Miyamoto is a very important person in Japan. I believe he’s been awarded the title of Person of Cultural Merit by the government. When I hear that such an inspiring person was inspired by my game, I feel very honored. And not just him, but I often hear that other creative people in this industry are also inspired by Space Invaders. I feel very happy to hear that.

GamesBeat: How do you feel about the enduring popularity of Space Invaders? Did you ever think it would last this long?

Nishikado: I was definitely not expecting the game to last this long when I created it. I wonder why it’s such an enduring game, why it’s so loved by so many people. The first reason is probably because the game is very simple. It’s open to a wide audience. The second is a product of the limitations of technology. Because of the limited graphical capacity at that moment, the characters were very simple, but people found them very “kawaii,” the Japanese word for “cute.” That’s another factor. When I went overseas, I saw a child playing Space Invaders, and I asked her how she learned how to play. She said she learned from her parents. I was very touched by the fact that the game was being passed from generation to generation.

GamesBeat: What do you think about the cultural of Space Invaders, and the cultural impact of games?

Nishikado: After Space Invaders, the game industry in Japan grew significantly. The number of game companies boomed. But it was still recognized as one of many parts of the entertainment business. Later, Space Invaders and other video games were installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. At that moment I felt that games were perhaps being recognized as culture, not just entertainment. Seeing video games as culture is more prevalent overseas than in Japan, I think. In that sense, in Japan we may be a step behind that point of view. But as I mentioned earlier, video games are slowly developing a position as part of culture, like I mentioned about Shigeru Miyamoto receiving his title from the government.

GamesBeat: How big do you think gaming will eventually become?

Nishikado: As far as how big it’s going to become, I’d say that’s an unknown future at the moment. But I believe that technology is going to grow more and more. Games are a platform for very high quality computer graphics. The popularity of that kind of thing is going to last for a while. But it will hit the wall at some point. I feel like we’ll see another game that will change the game for this industry. I’m excited to see it.